If you have been hankering for a new scifi singleplayer real-time strategy game – specifically, one in which the charm of your human protagonist is inversely proportional to the quality of the mechs – spare a few moments for ZeroSpace. A collaboration between Starlance Studios and Ironward, it puts you in charge of a galactic “Protectorate” army made up of units from various species or factions, and invites you to splattergun swarms of grumpy arachnids, while navigating “through political turmoil in the Orion sector”. It’s out in early access on 20th July.

Aside from top-down Starcraft-style combat, Zerospace offers branching dialogue in the Mass Effect vein, with players confronted by such philosophical dilemmas as “mission comes first vs maybe it would be bad if all of my soldiers died”, to paraphrase the one bit of dialogue from the trailer, below. I hope this isn’t what they mean by ‘navigating political turmoil’. There’s also a Planetside-esque Galactic War component, in which player alliances scrap to paint a persistent online map their colour.

Speaking of painting, the standout attraction here is that they’ve enlisted Relic co-founder and former Homeworld artist Aaron Kambeitz to give the art an overhaul. The kitbashed magnificence of his work on the mechs just about makes up for the humanoid characters in the trailer being utterly bland. It’s like somebody ran a floorpolisher over Manshep, Garrus and Liara. Anyway, here are some game features, served a la blockquote in the traditional Parisian style.

• A singleplayer campaign with 15 main story missions, 10 hero loyalty missions, and 15 side story arc missions. With choices and dialog trees similar to Mass Effect and Baldur’s Gate.
• Hours of cinematic cutscenes and interactive dialogs where your choices dictate the game’s outcome.
• 10 specialist heroes from various factions in campaign mode to build relationships with, or select from over 14 to lead your multiplayer games.
• A separate, MMO Galaxy map with multiple game modes that contribute towards shared galactic conquest. (Co-op, Single-player, PvE, 2vAI, 2v2, Scenarios and 1v1)
• 4 main factions – From a plant species to organic robots.
• 7 mercenary factions – Delivering even more specialized battle groups

Beefcakey and derivative though this may appear in places, I like the idea of splicing together my own space army from retinues of Hiigara-flavoured Gundams and tree people. I’m also sort of fond of Ironward, who started out as Warcraft modders – their best-known game, The Red Solstice, is based on Warcraft 3 mod Night of the Dead. Read more on Steam.