It's the fate of every game with voxels and terrain deformation to be immediately compared to Minecraft, but Dysis is one of the few to take an entirely different tack, combining real-time strategy with first-person shooting, base building with a splash of tower defence, and robots with... other types of robots. Sole Developer Chris Farrell makes real robots for a living, so expect this element to be fairly well researched.
The game will begin with your crash-landing on a procedurally generated alien planet, with only an army of androids to your name. Luckily, you have the power to sculpt the environment, either to hide your base, or build structures to defend against an approaching robot tide. When you tire of orchestrating the battle like some master puppeteer, you can also hop into a robot and pilot them in first-person. The droids themselves look a bit like the Replicators from Stargate, swarms of mecha-critters that devour everything that crosses their paths.
Chris was asking for $5,000 on Kickstarter to make it happen, but he's already $3,000 over that goal, with 24 days to go. As a result, he's adding modding support, and he's updated the stretch goals to include space station battles at $10,000, "ancient alien underground structures" at $15,000, and the ability to travel to asteroids and other planets at $20,000 and $50,000 respectively. While there's no word on a release date yet, you can see if your spare 50K is worth it with the following Kickstarter trailer.
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Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.