Space Engineers: A New Indie Game That Looks Promising

Space Engineers is a game in-development that, just today, released for alpha play on Steam. For the rest of October, it’s only $15.

I have a soft spot for simulation games, and this one struck a chord. It’s an indie game: check. It had pretty nice graphics (for an indie game): check. The premise sounds interesting: check!

In Space Engineers, you build small and large ships and space stations. What you do after that is mainly restricted to mining, shooting things (or other players), and just being creative. The developers have stated that they’d rather players get creative with traps and building than openly shooting at each other. We’ll have to see how that turns out.

It looks really interesting. However, the current alpha version has a few features disabled, namely mining, using any tools or weapons, along with a couple of other features still being worked on. For a full list, check:  http://store.steampowered.com/app/244850/

The developers have put out a short tutorial that shows off the basics of the game, although you’ll still have to do a fair bit of learning on your own:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHk6L0zNB6U

So far, all you can really do in the game is fly around in ships and your jetpack, build ships and stations, and then ram your ships into stuff. It’s actually kind of satisfying to ram into things.

It’s pretty challenging at first, but the learning curve isn’t nearly as bad as some other games (looking at you, Kerbal Space Program).

Give it a look, see if you’d want to play it when all the features are active. This might be the cheapest you can grab it for awhile. I can’t wait to see what else will be added in the future.