I occasionally check out what Steam has going on, which usually results in waking up several hours later surrounded by receipts for games I have no memory of buying. I suspect at some point there will be no more games to buy, and I’ll finally be out of the woods…which is like saying that some day Charlie Sheen will kick his drug habit because there’ll be no more cocaine left, but that’s not the point of this post (sorry if you came here looking for “Charlie Sheen Coke Habit”).

The last item on Steam’s banner rotation was Evochron Mercenary, a space flight/combat/trading/mining/kitchen sink sim. I took it as a portent, since just the other day one of my friends had mentioned the need for another Freelancer. After looking over the feature set to EM, I downloaded the demo and took it for a spin.

The first thing that was set spinning was my head. As I may have mentioned here or in other places, I’m drawn to complex, in-depth strategy and simulation games, but I rarely have the time or patience to sit down and learn or to play them. EM was an exception. I stuck around through 75% of the continuous tutorial (it can be had in pieces as well) before I shut it down and figured the best learning experience is in dying on my own.

EM is a free-form sandbox space sim. You can pick up missions from the station to earn money, or you can trade goods from port to port, or mine, or tackle pirates, or customize your ship, or build space stations, or land on planets, or find hidden areas of the universe, or just drive yourself insane trying to keep all of this straight in the face of a control scheme that would make the space shuttle interface look like an iPhone. Really, to start, you just need to know how to move, how to jump, and how not to crash into things like stations…or planets. Everything else can be had in time, as time allows.

The thing that might really sell me is the multiplayer aspect. We played a heck of a lot of Freelancer back in the day, running a local server 24/7 just for our local group, getting together to run missions and goof around. There was no driving impetus pushing us forward, except to blow up pirates and make a lot of cash. But we had fun, and a certain kind of fun that we haven’t been able to find in this “advanced” age of massive multiplayer servers or tea-bagging spawn campers. EM may allow us to have that kind of fun once more, but with the feature-horsepower that a lag of several years can provide. While EM offers much of the same types of gameplay that Freelancer offered, it seems to move things along by providing Newtonian physics-based movement, ship customization, and even the ability to reap benefits from controlling a star system or building a space station.

I’m not convinced that this is the kind of game that can be enjoyed for an extended period of time alone, since it doesn’t seem to have much of a central narrative outside of “go out and do stuff”. The server is limited to 35 players (the server is downloadable and you can run a personal edition for you and your community) which is gated by the horsepower of the machine it runs on, so we’re not talking MMO-scale here, or even a greater community. You won’t be playing with strangers, unless you plan on operating a server farm on some 24/7 high end hardware. That means that the potential long term enjoyment of this game may lie in the throwback intimacy of the early days when we had to run our own servers that were limited in access and were only fun when everyone (all handful of them) were online at the same time.

That’s not a slam on EM, because this kind of private universe is just what we’ve been asking for. The real shocker is that the developer is a one man shop. This dude must be some kind of world-crushing super genius in order to keep pumping out games in this series, alone, and each with increasing depth. I think that fact alone means that EM is one indie game I can get behind, because I enjoy it, it’s my cup of tea, the price is comfortable ($25), and an update on the EM site hints at upcoming improvements that sound even better than what we have now: better visuals, the ability to move around on the planet surface, and more.

There’s a demo available on the EM site, although not through Steam, so if you have any interest in sandbox space sims, give it a shot. The demo allows you access to everything the universe has to offer for 90 minutes, which was long enough to let me blow myself up a few times, tackle several missions, upgrade my ship, and learn some of the finer points of interstellar navigation.