Vox Machinae — 20$ (20% off)

A mech shooter is such an obvious fit for VR that I’m a little surprised we’re not inundated with them. Even if you correctly have no interest in VR though, Vox Machinae is worth considering. It essentially does what you probably already assumed: players pilot different classes of mech (the difference being their balance of mobility, firepower and armor — there are no support roles), pick their lasers/rockets/cannons, and go out in teams to robo-kick each others’ computo-faces in. Although there is bot support (which unusually I haven’t tested, as I was having plenty of fun with — ugh — humans) it’s primarily multiplayer, and really rather impressive. The game modes are fine — occupy bases on the map, race to a randomly appearing salvage spot and fight over it. The levels are very vertical thanks to inbuilt jet boosters, and the sensation of ponderous, weighty movement is already there. There’s even a dedicated ramming mech, and the guns and modular destruction of limbs and hardpoints put some past entries in the genre to shame

Frontier Pilot Simulator - 10$ (60% off)

Flight simulators are a difficult proposition. Most are content to court a dedicated niche audience who are happy with esoteric controls and complex systems, so this one was a real treat.

The technical term for your ship is a rotatey cool thrust jet thingy, and you use this to fly about an alien planet, ferrying goods and passengers between human colonies for money and fun. Gravity and inertia and wind are big factors, making much of the challenge in taking off and landing without embarrassing yourself too much. I’ve complained before about trading games of this ilk being just a grind, but Frontier Pilot Simulator solves that problem by making the flight itself rewarding and satisfying. The flight controls are straightforward, though the trade menus need work and there’s a lot of confusing clutter on the screen, all of which needs some configuration options. Hopefully, this will all be ironed out during the Early Access period, as there’s certainly a lot of potential here.

Star Traders: Frontiers — 15$

You are the captain of a starship venturing through a massive open universe. Customize your crew and take command at the helm of your very own ship as you explore a galaxy torn apart by internal strife, alien threats, and political intrigue.

Pirates! Can we outrun them? Damn! Well, would they accept a bribe? What? They won’t even consider it? Okay, well, drop the cargo. No? Give them the ship and they’ll let us live? Oh, they’re not actually pirates, they’re just mindless omnicidal monsters pretending to be pirates? Well… I guess I’ll just reload an old save, then.

That’s how some games treat pirates. It’s stupid, boring and rubbish.

Star Traders: Frontiers is better than that. It’s better than just about everything.

Deliver Us The Moon: Fortuna - 20$

Whenever something goes wrong IN SPACE, the protagonist must clomp back and forth fixing doors and rebooting engines and getting the access code from that guy’s desk (which is infuriatingly bulletproof because people do it in real life all the time). And it’s probably aliens, and it’ll be heavily foreshadowed immediately. Deliver Us The Moon has both an interesting premise and a genuine mystery. Those dozy Earth people have messed up the planet again, this time by running out of fuel, but also discovered a way to generate tonnes of clean (I think?) energy from a helium isotope which happens to be abundant on That Moon. A colony is built, it smelts the helium or whatever and beams the energy back to Earth via microwaves (theoretically doable — space nerds were already bouncing the idea around when I was in school, but then EVE Online came along and distracted them so it never took off). But then it suddenly stops, and Earth is hosed again.

So, you and some rogue astro-boffs have scraped together a rocket and launched a desperate solo flight to the colony to find out what happened and fix it. I wouldn’t normally relate a plot in such detail but Deliver Us The Moon is one of the very few games to make realistic modern space shuttle stuff interesting and approachable to me, and I’m really curious to find out what happened because it could be anything. It’s mostly about floating about the moonbase cutting cables, listening to audio logs, and replacing gubbinses, and it’s not particularly taxing. But it looks nice, has a decent atmosphere, and it’s all a little bit understated. I want to find out what happened, and for once it feels like I’ll wind up helping to fix it rather than blundering into a face-eating space mutant.

What would be your chose?