Let's play Starforge Alpha: building your future on an alien planet

Over the holiday, I picked up a bunch of early access games on Steam, and I’ve been trying them out one by one. Most of them weren’t created by Asian developers, but they’re available worldwide through Steam, and I thought taking a closer look at each of them might provide some insight into the way game development is changing, especially for indie developers looking to finance their own games through selling early access builds.

Anyway, the first game on our list is Starforge, a first-person building, shooting, and exploring game that puts the player in the shoes of a soldier/engineer who’s been dropped onto an alien world and tasked with surviving. Currently, the game just has an open-ended survival mode and a fort defense mode where you build defenses to fight off waves of enemies. But I’m the kind of guy who doesn’t need a quest marker to have fun in a game, so I dove into the game and so far, I’ve had fun. Check it out:

This post is the first in our Early Access Experiments series, which will look at a bunch of Steam early access games before pitting them head-to-head and asking whether these games are good for consumers, and whether this is a monetization model that should be adopted by more Asian developers.