Happy Star Wars: Squadrons day, internet. I have nothing to offer but the sneer of a veteran Elite Dangerous pilot. A disdainful scoff as you vroomify your engines in the docking bay, click-clacking your flight checks in the seat of some dusty Y-wing, some classless X-Wing, some bogus B-wing. Who do you think you are? Sitting there in the pilot’s seat of that garish tin can. Only an exponent of the foulest incorrectitudes would indulge a shipyard with all the basic-ass nomenclature of an episode of Sesame Street. Here, you fripperist, you child, gaze upon the true list of the 9 best spaceships in games.

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Are you going to the glittering Imperial city of London next month for games show EGX Rezzed? I m not. I ve got a stag weekend in Madrid where I m expected to play Gaelic football with a crowd of storming drunks. Trust me, you re better off in the bright glass hallways of Tobacco Dock, especially now that six more games have been added to the line-up, including Disco Elysium, the surreal isometric adventure formerly known as No Truce With The Furies. (more…)

Exploding time. I found the controls of roguelite sci-fi dogfighter Everspace difficult to absorb but respected the combat-heavy feeling of it. Fwooping from star to star and blasting everything as my weapons overheated and hull cracked. It s got a new expansion today, called Encounters, which adds a new ship, weapons, abilities and tools, as well as new space stations and planets to orbit, like the Okkar Homeworld. They re the space lizards who like to kill you on a regular basis. Perhaps you d like to visit them. (more…)

It’s only been a few months since the release of Everspace [official site], the extraordinarily> pretty space dogfighting game with rogue’y bits. Resident RPS space-boffin Brendan thought it was quite nice, if a little light on juicy details to really get your teeth into. Being just a few months since it launched, it comes as a bit of a surprise that not only have they announced an expansion – Encounters – but it’s due out later this month. Check out the impressively bombastic teaser trailer after the jump.

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Sci-fi dogfighter Everspace [official site] has been stuck in the early access nebula since September last year. But last month it turned up the warp crank and charged the star batteries to “quite full”. Zoom! It s a roguelike that our Alec took a peep at once before. But it’s properly out now, so I m going to tell you wot I think.

It s an arcadey, gun-swapping dance of asteroids and explosions. I d call all the boosting and lasering and missile-launching a ballet but that would imply some finesse on the part of the pilot, whereas I have none. Nevertheless, it s a better-than-average dogfighting sim – uppercase DOGFIGHTING , lowercase sim . … [visit site to read more]

Oh my lord, somebody needs to defeat this notorious E3 war machine once and for all. The RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, have gathered their forces to take on the monster. We’ll be tackling all the big news: Beyond Good and Evil 2, Wolfenstein 2, Sea of Thieves, Anthem, Life Is Strange: Before the Storm and lots more. We’ve so much news to talk about that we’ve recruited news editor Alice O’Connor to come help us. We’ve also sent Adam behind enemy lines to Los Angeles, but have only been able to recover a handful of his communiques.

This week’s special extra-long episode also features some chat about Alice’s murderous efficiency in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Pip’s floundering in Football Manager 2017 and my doomed piloting in Everspace. We also discuss the origin of the name “E3” and discover a patchwork quilt of possible etymologies. … [visit site to read more]

I like space ships. I like explosions. And, occasionally, I like rock music. So in theory I should love Everspace [official site], a space combat game that has just launched out of early access to its full release at least if the trailer’s anything to go by. … [visit site to read more]

Roguelikelike space shooter Everspace [official site] will leave early access and properly launch on May 26th, developers Rockfish have announced. (You might now Rockfish from the Galaxy on Fire games on pocket telephones.) If you dug the sound of Everspace when Alec had a play last year and thought you might have a crack when it was done, make a note. Or if you’re already onboard, hey, the last big pre-launch update has arrived to add a mysterious alien race, full functional cockpit views for all ships, new upgrades, and other odds and ends. … [visit site to read more]

This is some kind of sick joke, isn’t it?

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To some extent, “early access game” is increasingly a school of design as well as a state of development. Let’s play bingo:

CraftingLootingPermadeathFree-roamingProc-gen“story to be added later”

And there you’ve got yourself the recipe for a potential Steam hit, as Everspace [official site] has been.

… [visit site to read more]