Stars in Shadow screenshot showcasing the diplomacy system

If you're a fan of oldschool 4X strategy games you might want to pay attention to Stars in Shadow as it appears to be a rather faithful homage to the genre as a whole. There's plenty of star systems to explore and settle, a variety of alien races to either enslave or ally with, and naturally, the ability to construct your personal fleet of battleships with which you can 'unify' the galaxy.

As for what exactly this looks like in-game you can find out by taking a glance at the most recent trailer. Don't expect to get a detailed overview of what the gameplay is all about since the whole video is rather short, but it should still give you a general idea. Anyway, have a look:

Stars in Shadow has been in Early Access since September last year, and over the course of the next few months has managed to gather a decent number of positive reviews. However, I would advise you to wait until it finally releases on January 19th before buying as apparently its still suffering from a bunch of quality of life issues. For example, one of the issues I've seen mentioned in a couple of Steam reviews is the simple fact that you can only outfit one ship at a time... even though you can have fleets with dozens of pretty much identical ships! Its obviously not a game-breaking issue, but it is one that could slowly drive you insane, and so I would recommend waiting for launch-day reviews in order to see if these sort of problems have been fixed.

If you would like to learn more you can head over to either Steam or the official website. But if you would like to learn how to play, the developers have created a brief "Quickstart Guide" that you can find over here. And finally, here's a couple of images to send you off:

Stars in Shadow screenshot featuring a variety of ships

Stars in Shadow Battlecruiser screenshot

Stars in Shadow screenshot featuring turn-based combat

Stars in Shadow screenshot featuring the universe