Extreme arcade space combat game "Space Mercs" has officially released

Designed and developed by Bearded Giant Games, Space Mercs is an extreme arcade space combat game like some of the classics and it's out now with Linux support.

As a reminder, Bearded Giant Games have been developing Space Mercs entirely on Linux with the Unity game engine. Working from a low-powered Notebook, they've put a special amount of attention into the optimizations so it should work great across a huge variety of systems. It certainly does look good, with an impressive atmosphere to it!

Feature Highlight:

• Huge, real-time, space ship battles, with up to hundreds of spaceships on screen at the same time
• Mission battles range from small (3-10 ships) and scale up into the gigantic sector wide battles (400-500 ships)
• Single-player campaign where the stakes increase with every mission
• Thousands of projectiles on screen at every time
• Consistent graphics and performance even on really low hardware specs
• Shooter-style control and flight system optimized for Keyboard and Gamepad use
• Instant battle mode where you are thrown in a procedural generated battle of epic scales
• Loadout system for ship weaponry and internal systems
• Coffee-break design where you can pickup and play in short 3 to 10 minute sessions
• Functional cockpit display

As a surprise feature announced along with the release, Space Mercs includes a Battle Designer. Once you complete the main missions, it will allow you to make custom battles to participate in with up to 4000 ships. The developer provided some interesting screenshots taken from that mode (click to enlarge):

If you enjoy classic arcade space action, Space Mercs should be on your radar. It would be worth reading their release info post, which contains a few extra important bits of info (especially for owners of an AMD Vega GPU). Also, do check out our previous interview with Bearded Giant Games here.

You can find Space Mercs on Steam. With an itch.io release due later.