SpaceCraft is an online space exploration and building game spread across a vast galaxy of planets and corporations. Read our review of its early access build to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth trying.
Everything We Know About SpaceCraft
SpaceCraft Story
SpaceCraft’s story revolves around the player character, the so-called "winner" of a yearly lottery, given the chance to repay their massive debt to a corporation by exploring the galaxy and earning money. Unshackled from one set of chains and firmly bound by another, players must improve their spacefaring skills, gather resources from countless planets, and automate their processes to eventually earn their freedom.
SpaceCraft Gameplay
Following the same core gameplay loop as No Man’s Sky, SpaceCraft gives players free rein over their exploration of the galaxy using their loaned spaceship. Starting off with basic resources and upgrading their gear incrementally, players can eventually move on to refining their stock using automated bases on a planet’s surface.
Players have other options to engage the vastness of SpaceCraft’s galaxy with the introduction of Corpos, guilds of players cooperating to achieve contracts, goals, and commissions.
SpaceCraft Release Date and Time
Entered Early Access on June 11, 2026
SpaceCraft was released on Steam Early Access on June 11, 2026. An official full release date has not yet been confirmed by the game’s developers, but we’ll update this article with that information as soon as it is available.
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SpaceCraft Review [Early Access]: What No Man's Sky Once Was
No Promises to Keep, Started Mediocre Anyway
It’s been almost a decade since, but no one will ever forget the travesty that was release day No Man’s Sky. Half-finished and riddled with more holes in its promises and code than Swiss Cheese, Hello Games’ eventual masterpiece certainly started its life the ugliest of ducklings.
Why do I bring that up now that No Man’s Sky is unrecognizably fun and actually worth playing? Because that awful first iteration detached itself from the timeline and became its own game under a different title—or at least that’s how it felt when I tried out SpaceCraft.
Unburdened by lofty promises and guided by Hello Games’ mistakes, SpaceCraft had no business ending up how it did: slow, unimpressive, and more potential than actual value. There’s much to unpack here, most of it not good, so let’s just dive in.
Debts to Pay, Worlds to Explore
We begin with SpaceCraft’s story, which is closer to The Outer Worlds than it is to No Man’s Sky in terms of narrative themes and messages. You are in debt to a huge, intergalactic corporation, and unfortunate as that may be, it looks like your luck is starting to change. Having won the yearly workplace lottery, you now have a different way to repay what you owe without slaving away in the bowels of a space station. It’s one set of chains for another, but at least the new ones come with a snazzy new spaceship.
That’s about it for SpaceCraft’s story at the moment, glossing over some mostly instructional introductory missions. Right off the bat, it’s clear that there’s no altruistic erudition going on here like in NMS, as it’s very clearly capitalism at the forefront here.
It’s not new, but I don’t hate it. The way SpaceCraft approached the themes is at least not as heavy-handed as The Outer Worlds’, but the messages it preaches do not thrive in subtlety, so you’re constantly being bombarded with the reminder that the corporation is ever-present and that they own you.
I’ll give the game props for trying out an old story in a new way, I wouldn’t go as far as saying it cooked with this one, though. For one thing, taking the whole corpo angle away, there isn’t much to say about this galaxy, which is wild considering how big it is. This is a symptom of a larger issue SpaceCraft has at the moment compared to its big-time comparison.
A Lesser Infinity with Worse Progression
If you’re familiar with the concept of countable and uncountable infinities, then you’re pretty much seeing SpaceCraft’s spread of worlds and galaxies compared to NMS’s. If you’re unfamiliar, the two represent types of infinite sequences, but one is bigger than the other, despite both being endless.
Now, translate that to video game design terms, and you’ve got something that’s perpetually on the back foot. I mean, one is a legitimate galaxy teeming with life, spread across countless worlds, with aliens, their languages, architecture, and culture at the forefront of their identity. The other is Barren Planet Simulator 3: Deluxe Edition. I’m confident I don’t have to tell you which is which.
I could double down on that comparison by bringing up scale and how SpaceCraft fails to elicit awe through its use of scale to convey size and distance effectively. I could even triple down by pulling its barevones ship crafting system into this. Granted, it’s not fair to compare something that had a decade to get it right against something that’s technically not even in 1.0 yet. I will say, though, NMS had plenty to work with on release, it just didn’t deliver ALL of its promises; SpaceCraft is dead in the water from the get-go.
But, sure, let’s critique SpaceCraft on even terms. What about game progression? Surely it actually lets you enjoy the sandbox of its lesser infinity, right? Well, yes, it does, though much slower. SpaceCraft’s gameplay stands on the pillars of SpaceShip utility and automated resource processing, the latter of which you’ll have to rely on space stations to get done in the early game, and your own factories in the mid-to-late games.
It saddens me to say that getting through both, one after the other, took so long that by the time I actually made it to planet-side base-building and automation, I’d lost all interest and just wanted the slog to stop. It’s the missions and the balancing of ship mechanics that get in the way, see? Your spaceship is upgraded by crafting everything from scratch and piecing together a craft from what you make (including a base ship from the tutorial).
New mining lasers, cargo holds, batteries, scanner arrays, and other modules make up the selection of upgrades you can buy, and that much isn’t the problem. The issue is that you’re always in your ship, and your ship is always in transit, making this a slow game because no progress can be made without you getting there first, and that last part takes ages.
Even in a vacuum where both are assumed to be developed equally, SpaceCraft loses.
Being Completely Online Does Not Help
Not to dogpile the poor title or anything, but there’s more to say about SpaceCraft that just condemns it further. Its online multiplayer functionality, though far from unique, does differentiate itself from NMS by being constant and server-based instead of existing as an option you have in addition to playing solo.
One might think that’s a good thing, but the fact that SpaceCraft requires you to play in servers with randos and be online for even the smallest endeavor means that this game is literally unplayable offline.
That cuts its replayability by a lot, as not only must you buy the game, but you must also make sure you have a connection to make it work. It also has to be a stable one, since you’ve got other people to worry about now, whether you like it or not.
Offline play should be allowed, even if limited to single-player, like how Minecraft does it. They share a name, but they sure don’t share philosophies, these two.
Sights and Sounds Don’t Make This Game Pop
Moving on to presentation, SpaceCraft is at least competent with how it shows its sci-fi sandbox, making planets the spectacles they ought to be. The space station designs are quite nice as well, flawed though their scale may be. I can see the effort to make this game stand out in looks, the same way NMS made itself a visual blend of retrofuturism and other aesthetic movements.
It doesn’t, though. It tries, yes, but it doesn’t succeed. Be it through fundamental design flaws like its inconsistent use of scale, or just plain exhaustive use of specific visual cues in sci-fi media, SpaceCraft does NOT look like anything special, even if its gameplay could potentially prove otherwise.
The same goes for the game’s sounds, which include voice acting that’s audibly amateurish, but acceptable, and background music that stutters and skips over itself at random parts of the game’s simulation. No shade for the former, since not everyone can afford top-tier professional talent, but the latter is just plain poor implementation.
Too Small a Step, Too Non-existent a Leap
And so, we’ve reached the galactic edge for SpaceCraft’s early access release. If there’s any word I can use to describe this game, I would choose "small", though "too small" would be more appropriate.
It dared to be like a game that had to earn its spot in many people’s hearts the hard way, which isn’t a crime, nor is it a bad idea. Unfortunately, with how little its operation is in comparison, it could only imitate a small fragment of its target, specifically a chunk of its early existence as a very flawed product.
SpaceCraft is an unfinished game, and you can feel that much from the rawness of its mechanics and the lack of polish the system has overall. Perhaps it can be like NMS in the end, beloved by many, and its awful beginnings forgiven but not forgotten. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
Seeing that this game is little more than what No Man’s Sky once was, one shouldn’t expect the same miracle to happen twice.
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