Space Engineers now available via Steam early access

I'm hoping that Space Engineers can overhaul the reputation of the humble space engineer from psychotic limb-chopper Isaac Clarke of Dead Space to something more placid and workmanlike. Space Engineers lets you drift around in a spacesuit, building scaffholding and welding plates together to build spaceships that you can crash into other space ships. Not that serene, then, but it's interesting enough to be one of the 14 space games we're excited about right now. That doesn't necessarily mean you should go out and pay £12 / $15 for the early build that's just arrived on Steam, of course, but if you're convinced you'll enjoy the ship-building, ship-crashing sim, then here it is .

Looking at the paid-alpha feature list , ship-building and basic planets are in, but sound effects, detailed models and multiplayer aren't, yet. It's made by the folk behind Miner Wars 2081, and uses that game's voxel engine to render collisions and destruction.

According to the Space Engineers site, the devs have "decided to only talk about features actually present in the game (fully finished or work-in-progress). We won't speak about planned features, our ideas, future dates, road map, etc," which is a bit of a drawback when you're asking people to invest money now to support a nebulous final product.

It looks really neat, though. Here's some alpha footage.