Theme Park In Space With Guns: The Spatials

Ooh, a game about building a space station so fancy it attracts visitors from far and wide! That sounds pleasant, The Spatials. What's that? And you've got star systems and procedurally-generated planets to explore too? Well gosh! And missions to complete? Aren't you a busy little thing! And combat and looting and levelling up and whoa whoa steady on there. I'm often hesitant about games trying a lot of things, concerned they might do too much not well enough, but I do like the sound of a lot of The Spatials. Which, it turns out, has been in early access for months.

Right, so. You build a space station with everything its residents need and visitors might like - shops, gardens, kitchens, cafes, libraries, museums, holodecks, medbays, living quarters, barracks, factories, and so on - in a Theme Park sort of way (though placing the important bits within it reminds me more of Theme Hospital). That sounds grand.

You have a staff manning the station, of course, with their own needs and whims. And you can send them on away missions to planets, roaming around, shooting things, and all that space stuff. And your spacemen level up, and can be given fancy gear, and... it's a lot to throw together. But if the station and planetary sides are decent enough and mesh nicely, it could be pretty swish. With development of Spacebase DF9 cut short, I have a hankering for a new space station game.

Here's some sort of overview trailer:

The Spatials began life as an iPad game but after a poor start, developers Weird and Wry began revamping and expanding it for a PC release. You can buy into the paid alpha on Desura for £5.99, which will get you a Steam key once the game is out there in a few months. It won't do the Steam Early Access thing, going straight to finished.

And here, look at this trailer from August building a burgeoning space station: