NEED TO KNOW
RELEASE 2024 in Early Access
DEVELOPER Blackbird Interactive
PUBLISHER Team17
LINK earthlessgame.com
I'm the first journalist in the world who's laid hands on the new sci-fi strategy game from the studio behind Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, and I've just broken it to pieces in front of them. I'm having a great time.
Every time I preview a game that has unfinished art and narrative dead-ends scattered around like landmines, there's the potential for an awkward moment where the game flat-out breaks. The developers take control to sidestep a bug or reboot after a crash; they apologise, keep it light with some smalltalk.
, though, which is a hybrid of a roguelike deckbuilder and a grid-based strategy game, hasn't bugged out or airlocked itself straight to desktop. I've just stumbled onto a card combination that the developers clearly didn't expect, steamrolling my director Hoi-Fung Ma. Apparently art director Rob Aduna had never tried what I would soon dub the Shield Meta.
