Boldly going where no block has gone before in Space Impossible

Tea, Earl Grey, Hot. These are the voyages of the starship Venture in Space Impossible, an open-world sandbox space adventure where every block matters. Think of it like a 2D version of Avorion, complete with both single-player and online/LAN multi-player modes. Everything in the game is made up of little blocks, that can be destroyed and have things attached to them, there's factions, trading and "Near-real Newtonian physics".

Space Impossible is a game I hadn't properly checked out since writing about it back in March last year, when I found it had a Linux test build available. A long time later, it does now advertise official Linux support and they just recently released an exciting update. Alpha 18 was sent into space earlier this week, with a focus on the combat to make it much more interesting overall. For starters, there's now weapon control groups giving you a little more freedom over what weapons you want firing and when.

It really does look awesome, if you're a space-nerd like me.

You can now also lock onto a specific tile (an individual building block) and have your weapons do it all for you. There's multiple new weapon types like the Particle Cannon, with a longer charge-up time and a short range but it packs a wallop. There's also a more traditional Gun-like weapon, firing off multiple rounds that can ignore shields but accuracy is poor. There's also now Mines, Homing Missiles, a special Mass Bomb you can stick to an enemy vessel to shift its centre of mass and increase it too.

It's still missing a number of things to make it a truly great game though, one of the main issues being no tutorial. It's not the easiest game to understand but it's quite engrossing once you've got the hang of it a little. They're aware of it being needed, as it's on their roadmap. I'm particularly looking forward to them adding in Black Holes, Comets and things like that which sound exciting!

From my few hours spent with it since Alpha 18, I've been really enjoying it. However, the start of the game is painfully slow and not just because there's no tutorial, but to advance you need travel quite a lot which is also very slow going. Even so, it's hugely promising, a game for those who don't like to rush and take their time to tinker with ship designs. If the idea of flying around space, building your ship tile by tile and firing those lasers through the hull of an enemy ship sounds good to you it's worth keeping an eye on.

There's masses more changed with this update, which you can find details on here. You can find Space Impossible on Steam in Early Access.