There’s nothing quite like seeing the near destruction of your homeworld whilst simultaneously being shot through a wormhole to spur you onto great things. This Farscape-esque concept is what drives Legends of Pegasus, a new space 4X strategy game from Kalypso Media and NovaCore. We first saw it at GamesCom last year, and we’ve finally gotten our hands on some code so we can see what it’s like for ourselves. So far the potential is clear; however the still non-finished state of the game mires the experience with the usual bugs and oddities you find in pre-release code.

There are several elements to this game – it’s mainly turn based, with actions and movement taking various turns to complete, however when two opposing fleets come into contact with each other the gameplay instantly shifts into real-time. It’s fairly seamless, albeit a bit clunky at the moment, but it works quite well. Aside from that, there’s the building and management of your colonies, the building and maintenance of your fleets (ship designer ftw), and of course meeting and maintaining relations with other races. The world consists of many interactable objects, from asteroid belts to jump gates (which is the main travel between two systems).

You can be the interior designer you’ve always wanted to be!

Colony/Empire management seems also to be as interesting as we thought it would be. Each planet has an allotment of squares you can build on, as well as special traits that modify base attributes. There are many different types of buildings – population and culture, production, orbital structures, research… it’s like playing Tetris, only there’s a finite amount of space to work with, which means you’ll need to expand. Only a ship with a colonisation module will be able to colonise, and each of the planets in a system has a ‘suitability’ rating… the lower it is, the harder/impossible it is to colonise. We haven’t gotten to a stage yet where we’ve had to manage a large empire, so we’re not sure how it holds up there, but there is a Galaxy Map mode, fleet and planet scrollers, so it shouldn’t be too bad, although at the moment it feels a bit clunky.

Combat is like any real-time combat experience set in space. If you enjoyed SOTS2 and SINS, you’ll enjoy this, although we have the funny suspicion everyone always thinks space combat is more exciting in their minds than it ever really is. I mean it’s just two big hulks of metal throwing ordnance at each other. Still, it’s not all static… the smaller ships, like Corvettes and Frigates, will move around their targets, and keep them distracted, your bigger ships will just sit there and throw slugs or beams of light, whatever you’ve outfitted them with. All good Space 4X games come with a ship designer, and Pegasus certainly doesn’t disappoint. It’s much like SOTS2’s system in a way, you choose your main chassis, you can then add an extra section if available, and then you assign modules – weapons, defence and support/engineering.

 It’s hard to say which is the stronger part of the game at this point – the story is fairly well put together, and lasts for around 40 hours which is spread across all three races (each race gets four ‘episodes’ each, although they’re multi-mission outings that last a decent length). The skirmish mode of course gives you access to everything at once, so assuming you’ve mastered the basics, you should be ready to give the larger game a try. The mixture of real-time and turn based action, like Sword of the Stars II, allows it be relatively wide in scope. Galaxies can be huge, giving you ample room to explore and expand, and you can modify your game in a variety of wars, such as what tech tree your faction specialises in, special modifiers (Aside from racial ones that all factions of the same race get) and so on.

No no, wait… he might still win…

At the moment, the game is still a bit fragile. Some tool-tips and basic feedback elements are missing (we hope they are going to be added in), and we’ve had the odd crash to desktop and other bugs, but there’s still time to get it fixed. Sadly, it’s unlikely anything can be done to improve the ‘intuitiveness’ of the game, but when the tooltips and feedback get added, some of the pieces should fall into place quicker. We urge you to manage your expectations at the moment – we would hazard a guess that there will be bugs at launch, but with any luck all the game breaking stuff will be out of the way. As far as design goes, there’s little here to be truly disappointed in, apart from bit of a slow start in the first mission.

This is a strong contender for the game of space 4X throne, with a decent story, strong mechanics, visuals and a vivid universe. You could do worse. Legends of Pegasus is due out on PC on August 10th, 2012.

Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing what a massive fleet battle would look like.