Star Ruler was a 4X space strategy game where ships could be as big as planets, and carry weapons that could punch holes in suns. Its 2015 sequel, Star Ruler 2 flew under our radar, but was a slightly more coherent, traditional game, while still offering conflict on a truly daft scale. Developers Blind Mind Studios have been inactive for a while now, but this week they kindly made Star Ruler 2 (and its expansion, Wake Of The Heralds) open source. Better still: Everything but the music is included, so if you build it yourself, it’s entirely free.

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Before I get into the nitty-gritty, yes, we do know when long-zoom 4X indie spectacle Star Ruler was originally available to buy. However, anyone who has followed the game can tell you that what you get for your money now is a different beast to what you got at that nascent time. What could be regarded as the actual> launch is now here. We are all familiar with the terror of unfinished games and the horror of 0-day patches. It is easy to believe the entire global computing infrastructure has been put in place so that developers could ship as soon as they got tired and wanted a holiday. Star Ruler did turn up in that sort of unsatisfactory state, but the developers admitted that and they put out a representative demo as well. Since then, their support of the product has been exemplary. While I may not agree with everything they’ve done, the fact that they continue to listen and improve the game is exactly what we so often demand and so rarely receive. But the play’s the thing, so here’s wot I think.

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Hey, anyone remember demos? They were this crazy thing game-makers did when they wanted people to play their games but expensive pre-rendered trailers that said absolutely nothing about what a game was actually like hadn’t been invented yet! The crazy fools. What was the point in that?>

Star Ruler is like the last half-decade didn’t happen: a thoroughly PC-only space 4x game, and it has a demo>. An actual, honest-to-god demo! I haven’t played it yet, but I could hug it to death for that alone.
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Last week’s news that US high street gaming market-choker Gamestop had acquired the Impulse download service from Stardock caused a whole lot of shock in these parts. Looks like PC gamers weren’t the only ones a little troubled by the news; Star Ruler dev Blind Mind Studios has pulled its sci-fi grand strategy game from the digital store in protest.
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