Mein Gott A Demo! Star Ruler Comes Through

Hey, anyone remember demos? They were this crazy thing game-makers did when they wanted people to play their games but expensive pre-rendered trailers that said absolutely nothing about what a game was actually like hadn't been invented yet! The crazy fools. What was the point in that?

Star Ruler is like the last half-decade didn't happen: a thoroughly PC-only space 4x game, and it has a demo. An actual, honest-to-god demo! I haven't played it yet, but I could hug it to death for that alone.

Visually, it looks a little on the Homeworld side of things, but being a 4X game the scope's obviously much grander. And there's procedural generation, baby. And Newtonian physics. Baby. We should probably have written more about this. Anyone else been playing? Here's a trailer too:

The 124MB demo's over here, and you can buy the game from various popular download services here. If you're afraid of the internet and think that sinister men made entirely of balaclavas will steal your pockets were you to use your credit card on it, a retail release is due in September.

Oh, and if the name's ringing a bell but you don't know why, it's because devs Blind Mind Studios were the lot who pulled their game (that'll be this one, then) from Impulse in protest at its acquisition by Gamestop earlier this year.