I like a factory simulation that fervently embraces the basic evilness of factory sims, these games about wrapping a smoking, clanking straitjacket around a realm of organic colours and unsuspecting resource deposits. Or in the case of Asema, around the wonders of the interstellar abyss, and whatever life it contains. “You are old, one of many,” goeth the blurb. “There may be an infinite amount of your kind in the cosmos, older than stellar dust. But for you, the only space that matters is the one you can silence.”
Gosh, that’s a sentence, isn’t it? Up there with “Sins of a Solar Empire” in terms of billowing nihilism. What else have you got to offer, Asema? You say you’re replacing our beloved conveyor belts with huge railguns, so as to launch resource packages between factory nodes suspended in a 2D gravitational simulation? Yes, I think the grasping starbarons who read Rock Paper Shotgun would enjoy hearing about this.
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In Asema, you slowly build up a relatively freeform logistical network that reaches across moons and asteroids. You kick off with one drone in the rich shallows of the inner solar system, then extend your reach via unlockable technologies into the outer void.
The big problem is gravity, a “unique environmental puzzle” for any Kuiper Belt magnate trying to optimise their loading bay configuration. “Your heavy machines will naturally drift toward the nearest gravity wells, such as moons,” explains the Steam page. What’s more, “anything can become a gravity well when it has enough mass – even one of your own machines.”
If this is a daunting prospect, there are waterwings of sorts for people who can’t do slingshot maneuver equations in their heads. “You don’t need to calculate orbital math or plot trajectories,” the devs continue. “You just need to manage your economy. Build and power dedicated Focus arrays (computational anti-gravity) to keep your grid stable, counter the pull of the moons and gravity wells and keep your factories perfectly positioned.”
This does sound like it could ultimately rob the idea of its complexity, to be honest, but there is the implicit mid-to-late game prospect of power-outs that send your entire factory network spiralling into the nearest black hole. Yes, Asema has those too.
There’s a demo on that Steam page. The full game is slated for release later this year. If you’d rather shoot explosive shells out of those railguns, maybe give In The Black a look instead – it’s a space combat game from former X-Wing and Mechwarrior devs that also features a Newtonian physics simulation.
