Fractured Space [official site] finally warped out of the safety of the early access nebulae this month, making it a ripe target for the RPS fleet. We sent Brendan to do battle with the interstellar MOBA and tell us wot he thinks.
A few years ago there was a game called Stellar Impact. It was a MOBA set in space and it was pretty good. But, for whatever reason, it couldn’t compete with the Dotas and LoLs. The playerbase dissolved into nothing. It got to the point where, if you bought the game, you would find only a sorry derelict – the servers abandoned, the chat boxes silent. Fast-forward to the present day and you’ll see Fractured Space rumbling into sight, louder, bulkier and bristling with firepower. A new space MOBA has arrived, from a different developer. It isn’t perfect but it has hugely improved the process of pushing through space lanes. It also gets space battles.
Update: There’s now a statement from the developers about the current state of the microtransactions below.
Fractured Space [official site] was already cheap as space chips, but its journey towards completing development has taken another step forward as the game is now free-to-play as of today.
Each Monday, Rob Zacny picks through the detritus of early access to separate the games might one day be assembled into something worthwhile from those which should remain on the scrapheap.
Capital ship warfare is my favorite kind of pornography. I’ve watched Master and Commander a dozen times or so, but sometimes I put the disc in the drive just to watch the part where Aubrey gives the order to run out the guns and let fly on the French raider. I’ve watched the episode where Battlestar Galactica assaults New Caprica more often than I’ve watched any other part of the third season. When The Expanse came out this year, I wasn’t sold on the show until the episode where a Martian flagship perished in a pitched naval battle.
Fractured Space [official site] is free this weekend on Steam. It’s the early access cousin of Strike Suit Zero, which was from some of the same developers, and trades that game’s nimble space fighters for gigantic capital ships. It’s World of Tanks in space.
That sure sounds like a game that ought to exist and ought be good, but I haven’t played it. Maybe you could check it out this weekend and confirm for me whether either of those things is true.
Fractured Space [official site] is the team-based capital ship shooter that launched onto Steam Early Access late last year. It’s still there, waiting for a full launch next year, where developers Edge Case Games have recently released a pretty expansive update that includes a new game mode. “Frontline”, as it’s called, will take place in a single lane marking a distinct flip of the script as per Fractured Space’s standard multi-lane combat.
The three coolest things to pilot in space battles are, in no particular order: mecha; capital ships; and EVE Online’s Rifter. Edge Case Games was formed by folks behind Strike Suit Zero so they’ve dabbled with the first, and that third is off-limits, so here they are with capital ships in Fractured Space, the first game from their new studio. It’s a five-versus-five multiplayer capital ship throwdown with classes, customisation, and many explosions. Fractured Space warped onto Steam Early Access yesterday at the price of £6.99 and… oh, it’ll turn free-to-play at launch. Bit of an enthusiasm-dampener, that.
