If you’ve been a fan of the simulation and city-building genre, you’ve undoubtedly heard of Cities: Skylines. After their moderately unsuccessful release of Cities: Skylines 2, Paradox Interactive has decided to work on something entirely different that happens to be playable very soon: a space colony builder and exploration game called Starminer.
This is a complete departure from Cities: Skylines while still working in the same general style of gameplay, this time just having you explore around space to mine materials, build up a colony and base in space, then defend it from aliens as you and your fleet of ships have to survive with your profit intact. It’s going to be coming out next year, starting on Steam in Early Access.
What’s in the Starminer Trailer?
The trailer is mainly cinematic and only about a minute long, but it’ll get you excited if you’re into this type of space-sim game.
You’ll see it’s a massive open-world game where you pilot a tiny spaceship, exploring the interstellar wilderness and trying to mine resources from the asteroids and planets you’ll find floating all around you.
From the brief snippets of gameplay we do see, this is very much a simulation game, giving you a ton of different controls for your ship, letting you control the super fine movements while you’re mining, and giving you options to get away quickly if you see aliens on your back from getting just a bit too greedy with your looting.
Everything in the game is fully simulated, every bit of space you can explore being completely mapped out in real-time, similar to Outer Wilds, but on a much larger scale.
You’ll have to explore this dangerous, massive universe to collect resources and expand your operation by upgrading your ship, expanding your fleet, or selling things to make money.
This game also features a similar system to the GTA games, where the more dangerous you get on your mining operations, the higher your threat to the aliens, and the more detectable you’ll become.
If you don’t get in and get out quickly and safely, things will go south quickly, and you’ll have to defend your fleet with your life.
Overall, this will lead to a gameplay loop that’s undoubtedly far higher stakes than anything you might expect from these developers while taking the time to make a slower experience that can get hectic quickly.
It’s cool to see a single-player space simulation game go this route, too, since it makes you feel weak and underpowered.
There isn’t any confirmed release date, but they have said it will be in 2024 and that the Early Access launch is coming soon.
So far, they’ve only announced a release on Steam as a Windows-exclusive title, but we’ll just have to wait and see on any console releases and hope that the game is optimized correctly this time.
Further Reading
If you want to hear more about the best simulation games out there or some other indie classics, stay here for more!
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