Empyrion: Galactic Survival

I've been playing the pre-alpha of this game for a few weeks now and I'm loving it, more so than Reign of Kings which I've taken a sabbatical from because they recently decided that even the community servers had to be flattened in order to accommodate a fix to remove a bad bug, which pissed me off because I lost a castle that I'd spent an entire weekend building.

Anyhoo, back to Empyrion, I've now got a good base up and running and a couple of spaceships in my collection, hopefully the devs are competent enough to not have me lose this base in future updates!

This is my farm... ohh arrr!

Crafting is very in-depth, much more complex than other survival games I've played, trouble is, that can get frustrating in terms regularly of sending me off on a tangent when all I want to do get my sodding ship finished.

Not sure what I was thinking when I created this but it does kick ass... or NPC towers

The game is very early in development - you can't visit certain parts of each planet (the poles are closed off), vegetation just looks like it's been plonked down half-assed and the ship flight control mechanics are very sludgy.

This is my second, smaller, hopefully more manoeuvrable spaceship

The constant need to replenish oxygen and food bars is a bit annoying because they go down too quickly, which affects game balance because you're too distracted trying find food and manufacture oxygen to enjoy the scenery and explore. I'm hoping that future updates will 'slow' them down just a bit. Although having said that, I do think that they are an important part of the playability as this is a survival game and after all, the whole point of survival is to find items to, well, survive!

The devs are promising a lot in future updates like a fully working galaxy for instance, which is a big ask when the game has seamless exits and reentries to planets, God knows what the processing and data size requirements will be from a technical standpoint if they expand it galaxy wide... I guess we're trusting the devs with that one. However, if it does work out okay it will be awesome to be able to seamlessly fly from one planet to another in a massive multi-system universe... this game might even be the replacement to Freelancer that I've been searching for ever since Microsoft dropped it's development (and let's face it Star Citizen isn't going to be released anytime soon with all the faffing around they're doing).

My rooftop garage, complete with oxygen station...

Empyrion is hugely addictive, I often find my oxygen bar flashing red because I've been so embroiled in figuring out how to build my ships I've forgotten to replenish it prompting me to rush to the nearest oxygen station. I'm at the stage now where I've built so much stuff and taken so much time to build it all that I'm fearful of losing it. I have a huge list of game 'backups' that have array of confusing names, this is where the dedicated server part needs to come in so my progress is out there in the cloud rather than on my PC's local hard drive, the results of my addiction need a decent save point system!

In terms of stability for a pre-alpha it's pretty good, the only two bugs I've found is it hanging when I quit out (forcing a Windows 'searching for an answer to your problem' 'close' dialogue box) and a situation where I lose power cells when I try to mass load them into my water and oxygen generators (pro-tip to work around this bug: just load them one by one instead).

Definitely worth a go for £13, especially for the building system, it really has great potential.