The space 4X genre has been on fairly thin ice these past few years. While there’s been a steady stream of releases, very few have been really worthy of praise at launch – some (such as the original Sword of The Stars and Star Ruler) recieved enough post-release support to become fine games in their own right, but very weak launches hampered their sales badly. It’s a rough scene, with an unforgiving audience. StarDrive by Zer0Sum Games might just be just what people have been hoping for, though.

Currently in alpha, the preview code sent our way is clearly unfinished and missing great swathes of content and features, so it’s hard to get any kind of big-picture outlook on it, but what I have played so far is very interesting and surprisingly compelling. Essentially, this is a full 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) space strategy game played in realtime on a 2D plane, but with full hands-on control of your racial flagship being available to the player, allowing you to manually fight on the front lines in a manner not entirely unlike Escape Velocity or Transcendence.

Combat is highly locational and detailed. The ship-builder interface basically lets you pop the top off any of your ships and redesign all the internals, placing reactors, engines, guns and so on. The location of those components has a direct effect on combat, with the various systems taking damage when hit directly in addition to whittling down your overall hull strength. You can use this to your advantage, too. Enemy ship has a powerful front-firing cannon? Flank it and try and disable the gun, then safely attack from the newly generated blind-spot in front.

This really does give the game an edge – combat has been a traditionally weak element in the genre, but having it play out as part RTS, part shooter seems to address most of the common complaints. I can’t help but worry whether dividing the players attention between empire management and hands-on warfare will make things hard to manage, but hopefully there’ll be enough background automation features to keep your planets productively ticking over in the background.

The cornerstones of many 4X games are already in there, though, including racial customization, letting you define the physical, mental and environmental background of your species. Want a race of corrupt, warmongering, combat-adept brutes from a blasted, polluted hellhole of a planet? You’ve got it. A race of timid, tiny, half-blind bureaucrats with the most efficient engineers and shipyards in space? Dead easy. You even get a fleshed out textual summary of your race once you start the game, adding a little flavor to what could be otherwise bland stat-crunching.

It’s also pretty unstable at this point, and I’ve not been able to get too far without encountering a crash or freeze. Completely understandable, as it’s a hurriedly-assembled press alpha preview build, and not at all designed for public consumption at this point. There’s even some amusing (if copyright-infringing) placeholders for racial art, which I hope I can mod back into the full game. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the next playable version, especially as there’s a rather fancy-looking new UI in the works.

StarDrive is currently on Kickstarter, and looking for funding. Pledge $10 and it effectively counts as a preorder, getting you access to the full game on release. Pledge $25 or more and you get access once the game reaches the closed beta development phase. It’s early days yet, but the framework already in place is solid. Looking forward to seeing how this one develops over the coming months.

[Stardrive]

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