At first glance, Dreadnought looks equally grin-inducing to the Battlestar-loving side of my brain, as it is wince-inducing to the consumer side of it. First thought: simply gorgeous. Second thought: how many pieces of flight-sim equipment will I need to buy, and how many hours of training will I need to do in order to have battles as impossibly awesome-looking as the ones in the footage? The answer, is “none” on both counts. Dreadnought delivers the tension and thrills that should accompany a clash between massive capital ships, and it does so while walking a thin line between accessibility and believability.

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Controlling Dreadnought's ships, which range from modestly-sized support corvettes to the huge, eponymous dreadnoughts, is more or less like moving around in a first person, save for the fact that the A and D keys turn left and right rather than strafe. Shift and spacebar, ever the crouch/jump duo, move you down and up respectively along the z-axis. Aiming is handled with the mouse, and most of your standard armaments are turret-based batteries, so you can target freely in a full 360 degrees. It took me less than five minutes to fly comfortably and confidently.The space-sim lover in me knows that actually piloting a gigantic, space-faring vessel isn't so simple, but despite this fly-by-wire approach, Dreadnought successfully maintains an air of authenticity in the way its ships move. There's a delicious sense of inertia, a reluctance to turn or respond right away that could easily have made the controls feel clunky if mis-handled, but here it feels deliberate; weighty in a way that convincingly sells the concept that you're bending thousands of tons of steel to your will.It's well-sold cosmetically as well. With every input, bays of thrusters littered about my ship sprung to life; a small detail, but one that's indicative of the terrible case of ship-lust the developers at Yager must suffer from. Scores of individual weapon bays open to fire volleys of fire-and-forget Vulture missiles, rows of turrets pan and oscillate in unison as I swing my mouse around to track a new target; even when I'm getting blown out of the sky by a long-range artillery cruiser, it's tough not to giggle happily about what's happening on screen. And I'll be getting my revenge soon enough anyway.That artillery ship that just finished me off from afar sports a focused, extremely long-range energy weapon. It packs a serious punch, but it sure can't take one, and it can't fire its primary weapon outside of a 90-degree arc in front of its nose. Using one ship's cloaking device, I dip below some debris unseen. I hug it all the way down his flank, and wait for my cloak ability to come off cooldown, and once it does, I activate it again, peek out from cover right behind him, divert all power to weapons systems and lay into him. After realizing he can't come around fast enough to get a shot on me, he raises his shields, but it's too late. He goes up in a blaze of metal and smoke, and for just a moment I feel like Jean-Luc Picard (who would never normally have access to a ship with a cloaking device).Sure the production value is high, but it's these moments that cement Dreadnought in my mind. Positioning, understanding of your ship's capabilities, and knowing the weaknesses of your opponents are all heavily rewarded, and with multiple ship types in each class, the possibilities for synergistic team compositions are many. There's still no solid word on when in 2015 Dreadnought will grace us with its presence, but when it does, I'll be ready to play out some of those space-battles I always daydreamed of growing up.

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and argue with everything he says about them.