Astro Naughty Games recently announced a new space sim called Grimmstar. The game is one of those scaled simulators where you start off in a small ship and slowly accumulate support, build up a fleet, and eventually fend off attacks from army of enemies.
Grimmstar is a dogfighting sim at heart, where you fly around shooting down opponents in explosive battles. Your main objective is to rescue colonists from attackers. As you rescue the colonists and bring them back to your base, you can begin to recruit them into the fold as pilots to help you build up your very own fleet of ships.
You can assign your fleet to gather resources, mine for minerals, or focus on building up a strategic defensive or offensive force to take down your opponents. You’ll be able to swap out new parts for your ship as you explore new sandbox solar systems, unlocking new gear along the way, completing missions, and engaging in massive space conflicts.
You can see what some of the early dogfighting footage and exploration looks like in the announcement trailer below.
Visually Grimmstar looks… very dark.
The RTX features also seem more like it’s compensating for proper soft shadows. Why is it that when the RTX is turned off basic dynamic shadows completely go away and there are just black blops? When did RTX become a stand-in for basic multi-layered shadow rendering?
Anyway, the scale of Grimmstar looks good. Some of the ship sizes and space stations really capture a feeling of being massive. This will also play a part in the game’s combat where players will eventually be able to upgrade their stats, craft and upgrade their ship(s) with new parts, and eventually gain access to battleships, carriers, and capital ships.
Unfortunately the trailer doesn’t let us see what those massive battles look like, but I’m curious to see what Astro Naughty does with Grimmstar in the coming months and how the basic gameplay loops will be implemented.
If you want to keep track of the development or learn more about the game you can visit the official Grimmstar website.
