Star Citizen FPS Demo Showcases The Hazards Of Zero-G Combat

Cloud Imperium Games just released a nine minute video of Star Citizen detailing the first-person shooter combat. Not only do they showcase how the ground combat looks in the game (and it looks absolutely top notch) they also showcase how zero-g combat will play out in Star Citizen, too.

The first half of the video is just standard-fare first-person shooting. You can see that up until around the four minute mark it's like a sci-fi corridor shooter, which is pretty freaking awesome.

Keep in mind that Star Citizen is still a top notch space simulator, but since it's built on the CryEngine 3 it means that it has easy tides rolling into the FPS ocean. As you can see in the video, the combat is sleek and atmospherically immersive. The environments look top notch and the gun play is about as solid as one would expect from an AAA title. We get some physics properties affecting the combat, too, but I'll get in on that later.

Not only do gamers have the standard weapon load-outs to interact with, but there's also access to the high-end science fiction equipment, too: Gravity disruption devices, electro magnetic pulse grenades, phase shields, laser weapons and more. Cloud Imperium Games is making sure that there's plenty to play around with whether you're on the ship or off it.

The second half of the video moves away from the standard FPS shooting and demonstrates what happens when the gravity field within a ship is disrupted or shutdown. Now the cool part about it is that – according to head-honcho Chris Roberts – you can either manually shutdown a gravity generator or it can be damaged or destroyed during ship-to-ship combat. During a previous demonstration we briefly witnessed when part of a ship's gravity and life-support system was damaged during an assault and the player had to lockdown that sector to keep the ship stable. Freaking epic.

But getting back to the whole zero-g effect... you can use push and pull mechanics to wade through space. Roberts mentions that they mirrored some of the movement mechanics on the movie Gravity with Sandra Bullock.

I can't wait to see more of the tie-ins between the FPS combat and space simulation. I also wonder how ship-to-ship docking is going to work? That's going to be an interesting feature, no doubt.

We've also known that dreadnought class ships would be in the game, but I really, really want to see a capital ship. I thought there were some discussions about capital ships in Star Citizen but I can't remember off the top of my head if those would be available for players to command.

Anyway, I love that this is a big-budget independent project because seeing this game evolve and develop with full transparency is just so awesome. It makes the journey a lot more exciting as opposed to other titles where you're only being force-fed PR-friendly promotional puffery. I think Star Citizen has enabled gamers to really join in on the discussion of the development process and understand how some of the elements and mechanics come together.

You can learn more about Star Citizen by paying a kind visit to the game's official website.