New No Man's Sky update adds walkable gas giants among "trillions" of new planets, just in case you were running out - Related to giants, man's, solitary, else, not

It's now slightly trickier to accidentally buy a 'dead' Steam early access game

Steam early access games that haven't been updated in a long while will now be more prominently labelled as such, . As noticed by third-party tracking platform SteamDB, Valve have begun adding warnings to early access info boxes, making it harder to accidentally spend your pocket money on a promising project that hasn't advanced in years.

I'm not sure it was ever that easy to mistakenly buy a 'dead' early access game, mind you, but it saves you the Dr-Watson-level detective work of digging up the last few enhancement changelogs, or peering at the user reviews.

Valve have yet to formally announce this new approach. It's a popular move already, but there are a few complaints about the execution. In the case of poor Heartbound up there in this article's header image, some have pointed out that the game has in the recent past received updates in beta. Valve's labels only seem to apply to gaps between full public updates.

I'm writing this up partly because I'm interested to know what you all consider too long an interval between early access updates. At what point do you declare the patient dead on the operating table? Continuing with that metaphor, I guess Valve's new labels are the equivalent of a doctor walking around the surgery loudly saying "Ms Heartbound has definitely popped her clogs - I guess it's time to cancel her lunch order". Which, with any luck, will cause Ms Heartbound to jolt out of her stupor, protesting that "no no, I was just having a nap, please don't take my spaghetti bolognese with extra parmesan away".

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Space Engineers 2 early access review: a solid and solitary box of building blocks - yet not much else

Returning players will find a bare bones block-building grid that makes for a strong foundation. But everything else that makes its predecessor shine is still missing. Developer: Keen Software House.

Keen Software House Publisher: Keen Software House.

Keen Software House Release: Jan 27th, 2025.

£25/$30/€29 Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10.

It's a very sturdy core, I should say. You are let loose in an asteroid-littered realm of space, where a neat selection of example ships are docked around space stations or floating freely between the big floating rock worlds. You'll jetpack around, explore the stations, and probably very quickly clamber through the corridors of the bigger vessels to find the cockpit. Once behind the joystick of a big cruiser, it's hard to resist the trademark act of the game's marketing - driving extremely fast into another ship and watching the metal crumple like an empty can of Fanta under a fat donkey's hoof.

Of course, destroying someone else's sandcastle is never really as much fun as bulldozing your own. Creating ships is a matter of flipping through the toolbar and plopping blocks of light or heavy armour into existence to create a frame. Then adding the necessary thrusters, cockpit, and gyroscope to make the ship functional. All of these items are sitting in your spacesuit's magic hands, an infinite supply of aluminium rectangles and jagged triangular edges. The game is exclusively in "creative mode" for now, so there's no ore mining or material refining to be done. Just building.

Soon, you understand the importance of holding Ctrl to precisely align blocks along a handy grid. You discover the helpful "symmetry" plane that cuts your work in half. And being able to create pre-fabs is a straightforward (if sometimes fiddly) process of dragging boxes around anything you want to copy, then pasting it somewhere and saving it as a "blueprint". Within an hour or two, the building process itself felt surprisingly intuitive and snappy.

There is some friction. The "undo" and "redo" function that the developers cite as a revolutionary new feature has its limits, for example - you'll sometimes delete a block accidentally and try to undo it only to see an error message saying this time it's impossible, without really explaining why. Undoing errant paint gun sprays is also a no-go (although the devs say they already have this working internally, so it should be implemented soon). And it's hard to see how some pieces are meant to fit together. The window pane pieces, for example, don't allow as much modular freedom as I'd hoped.

In short, it's a bare bones creative sandbox, but the bones are strong and healthy. It is equally a place of directionless wandering and playful experimentation. You have meters for health, power, oxygen, and fuel - but no need to keep them in check yet. You can build cool-looking refineries, med bays, and cargo containers - but there is no way to meaningfully use any of them. You can crash the ship and rush dramatically to shut down the reactor! But actually, it makes no difference. Ships don't need a power source yet.

That makes this currently feel like a £25 building block toy, rather than a goal-oriented game. It's a very cool toy, admittedly. I made two ships. The first was a mean-looking drag racer, with waspy colours and spikey fins (the unconscious influence of a childhood playing Wipeout). The second ship was more nautical - an interstellar catamaran complete with solar sail. The giant freighter-class thruster that I ill-advisedly strapped to the arse means this machine gets to 1000m/s in a fearfully short burst. I even added a little crow's nest up the mast, but installed the seat at a jaunty angle. This being space, there's no problem with the crew mate up there being sideways.

Except you won't have a crew mate for a while. Multiplayer hasn't been added yet, and won't come along until after a sizeable number of updates, including the addition of planets, volumetric water, modding tools, and Steam workshop support. Judging by the developer's reliable history of updates and DLC for the first Space Engineers (a game RPS liked enough to play co-operatively for many months), there's good reason to look forward to all of that.

But it's not here yet, that's all. For those craving the direction and impetus of survival meter bars, the inspiration of co-op craftinating, or the sweet crunch of constructing factories of ever-more-efficient automation - this minimal alpha won't give you an ounce of what you're after. But if approached as if the only adult in the house has upturned a box of colourful bricks onto the floor and gone out to the pub for an hour, you can spend that time quite happily coming up with your own building projects. Design a torus-shaped holiday resort above the asteroid on the end of a big needle. Cobble together a spacefighter that looks like an annoyed squid. Paint absolutely everything an aggressive Martian red.

As a newcomer to the series, it's hard to know if someone craving more Space Engineers will be excited by the birth of a new but familiar playground, or if they'll be disappointed by the relative lack of things to do. Keen Software House have a ton of catching up to do before the sequel can rival its own predecessor in sheer variety. This is a common problem for creative games with long lifespans (it took a while for Crusader Kings 3 to properly appeal to me, just because it seemed like CK 2 already did everything I wanted).

Sequels that arrive fully formed don't have this problem. But this isn't that. Early access makes blank spaces obvious to long-serving fans, who will rightly look back at the first Space Engineers and observe that it still does ten times as much for roughly half the price. There's good reason to be hopeful that this sequel will become the definitive way to weld together planet-hopping death traps for your pals. But I wouldn't blame any astronauts out there for staying planetside until there's a little more to see.

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New No Man's Sky update adds walkable gas giants among "trillions" of new planets, just in case you were running out

I cherish my fairly sharp memories of the 2016 launch version of No Man's Sky, inasmuch as the contrast renders the latest additions to the wistful space game all the more dazzling. Dazzling and exhausting. What was once a relatively (and to some extent unintentionally) lean procgen exploration sim has swelled into a game of mechs, fishing, fickle weather systems, intricate asteroid engagements, starbases, nautiloids and capes. It is far bigger than it reasonably needs to be, and it's only getting more and more, er, infinite.

In No Man's Sky's Worlds Part 2 improvement, there is talk of adding "billions of new solar systems and trillions of new planets" to a game that already harbours more worlds than any mortal player community could ever explore, including new, somehow walkable gas giants that are "ten times bigger than our biggest planet". Also oceans so deep you can't see the sun. Please excuse me, I think my thalassophobia and agoraphobia have fused into a single sprawling fear of literally everything, "literally everything" being the title of a hypothetical No Man's Sky's improvement in, oh, let's say 24 months' time. Find a video below with commentary from Hello Games managing director Sean Murray.

Let me attempt to zoom from the terror of the macrocosm to the pleasantries of individual exploration and survival. The gas giants look a bit spesh, don't they? Going by the trailer, you'll be walking on their hard rocky cores or perhaps, hopping around on fragments of solid matter launched into their upper atmospheres. I assume they've wrangled with the problem that the gravity ought to render you two-dimensional. It predictably reminds me of Giant's Deep in Outer Wilds, which always used to make my knees dance a nervous jig whenever I'd fly through the clouds. The official patch notes may reveal more - they weren't live at the time this was written.

As for the deeper oceans, this is definitely making inroads on Subnautica's turf, though existing No Man's Sky oceans are pretty voluminous and atmospheric already. I am always glad to swim amongst dangling sacks of kelp. Please do not eat me, semi-randomised abyssal critters.

The video makes fleeting mention of Light No Fire, Hello Games's forthcoming fantasy roamabout, which takes place on one, Earth-sized planet. I continue to like that game's puckish Carrollian stylings, and letting the designers and artists focus on a single, albeit vast landscape could have interesting ramifications, but the more they flesh out No Man's Sky, the harder it is to see what Light No Fire really brings to the party. Hopefully we'll get a proper demo soon.

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