Untitled Ukrainian Game by Abyss Lights Studio E3 Preview

I know, this is vague, but on my second day, I saw a running video of a space combat sim play on loop. I just gazed at it and turned around to see a guy just smiling at me. The smile looked disturbingly insidious, but once I asked who he was, he gently told me how he was one of the developers. I then asked about what the hell this game was about.

Turns out it’s like FreeSpace 2. It’s a game largely focused on space combat with an extremely light smattering of Freelancer. You can partake on quests, but the ultimate joy lies in commandeering a space craft such that you can mix parts in and out, resulting in thousands of combinations, to blow other space craft up.

He made an interesting point on being able to destroy specific parts of a ship, and in the video I could see chunks of a vessel losing its metal plates as they drifted off listlessly. It’s not just for visual pizzazz either; you can shoot down engines handicapping major vessels and the same weaknesses apply to your ship as well.

The footage that was playing was two years old, due to the publishers demanding that no recent footage be shown until a deal was officially secured. A strange demand to be sure, but this looks fairly ambitious. The team has created an engine from the ground-up and will even be using their own distribution platform, which doesn’t exactly make me all that happy, because Steam and a cavalcade of others already exist. Still, Eastern European developers have been churning out a lot of quality PC titles in the past few years, even if they’re prone to completely breaking down from bugs. Sorry for the lack of a title; the developer really couldn’t say jack beyond the fact that yeah, it’s kind of FreeSpace 2.