After spending three years in alpha testing on Steam’s Early Access platform, Keen Software House announced that Space Engineers has graduated from the alpha phase and has moved into its big boy beta pants.

It’s been a long time coming, but the small beginnings of Space Engineers started with low-poly voxel creation kits for users to mess around with and design their own spaceships, weapons, stations and vehicles. The game eventually evolved over time and Keen Software House refined the game with better optimizations, improved performance, larger space instances, and higher poly voxels so that players could create higher quality ships and objects.

To demonstrate the game’s evolution over the course of the last three years, Keen Software House released a beta trailer featuring just under two minutes worth of gameplay and improvements, as discussed over on their official website. Check it out below.

I still never get tired of seeing those ships collide at the very beginning of the trailer.

It’s oh so impressive seeing some of those improvements. The dust effects when the ships land on the planets is super sweet. The improved spatial lighting gives the game a sort of Halo: Combat Evolved look, and – while it’s still a long ways off from some other games out there rocking PBR – it’s uber impressive for a game as large scale as Space Engineers.

The improved vehicular combat damage, weapon effects and the physics systems have all contributed to Space Engineers continually taking strides toward being a one-of-a-kind experience.

Given that they’ve made so many advances and have improved the game so much based on what it used to be, they decided to implement a campaign tutorial to help ease new players into the game.

This should definitely help with giving gamers a sound idea of how to pick up the controls, start building their own battleship and tearing through the megaverse with a Thunderhawk Shuttle like some kind of rogue Blood Angel on a killing spree.