Ready to die hot and confused? Here's a hardcore orbital warfare sim

It's Next Fest, so we're sampling as many demos as we can this week. You can download this one here.

Some interstellar navies run out of fuel in the middle of a space battle. I ran out of fuel 51 days before the battle even began. In Spacefleet: Heat Death you are given a map of solar system (well, just the Earth and the moon) and asked to hop from station to station, Lagrange point to Lagrange point, building up a fierce little gang of spacekillers so that you can survive an incoming bunch of baduns. The trouble: it is all presented like you are sitting at a computer workstation in NASA and if you don't know what Delta-V is from years of Kerbal Space Program you may as well put a giant laser to your head right now.

This is a strategy game rooted in hard sci-fi. It's the 23rd century and the Earth is swarmed by filthy spacetrash. You can buy ships and arrange them into fleets to fight or trade with many dirtbag factions - there are missile frigates, laser wielding corvettes, artillery bastards, fuel tankers, cargo haulers. They all look sort of the same, but each ship has a phone book worth of statistics that I cannot and shall not understand, covering things like "thermal output" and "mass flow rate". They have scary sounding weapons like the "BD Aegis" or the "HKG Ikazuchi". They are built to kill from 50 kilometres away. I have no idea how to use any of them.

Typically, in a game like this you point your little guys at the enemy and say "kill". And there is a part of me that would like to simplify Spacefleet as being the 3D tactical fights of Homeworld smooshed into the finicky orbital mechanics and time controls of Kerbal Space Program. But the simulation is much beardier than that. Kinetic weapons take the target ship's trajectory into account, firing off at seemingly mad angles that turn out to be fearfully accurate 60 seconds later. You need to ration your fuel between stations, and be aware of places with low reserves, lest you become stranded. A few toasty zaps of a laser can turn your best fighter into voidtoast. 

The tutorial harps on about heat management - pointing out that your ship drives generate heat and that this has to be carefully monitored mid-battle or your ship's own engine will fry the crew alive. There are ways to manually retract and extend said radiators. But will you be able to do that for six or seven vessels in the middle of a fight while navigating this throwback user interface? No. Probably not. This too feels intentional.

As you can maybe pick up from the menu-heavy and green-glowing screenshots, Spacefleet is one of those games. It inhabits a filing cabinet in my brain alongside others of the MicroProse pedigree, amid the likes of Mech Engineer, or Ostranauts, or Objects In Space. These are games where half the appeal comes from learning an archaic bunch of menus and buttons with as little guidance as possible. If this was made in the 1990s, it would have been packaged with a 75-page manual that has slick pages and an inexplicably beautiful smell. Your dad would've played it once then would've accidentally left it in the Microsoft Office 95 CD case.

All the writing is tiny, the icons are microscopic, you have to click on things you can barely see. If you have any eyesight problems at all, you will probably be thrown into fits of rage just squinting at the dialogue box in the tutorials. There's little intuitive sense to the interface's operational design, and the directions of your teaching pal in those tutorials doesn't clear things up beyond offering some useful keyboard shortcuts. 

And yet, to a very simmy sort of person, there's quiet pleasure in trying to click things or frantically find the "offense" button or "launch" command as enemy missiles careen silently toward one of your vessels. Here the drama is contained not in close-up shots of big warheads with a trail of fire, but in an ellipsis of tiny red icons slowly arcing across the blackness. The missiles are miles and miles away, until they are suddenly not.

Even with its purposeful anti-learnability, there is a lot I like about the UI. When you hover over any enemy, a little extra window appears in the corner of your screen - a camera tracking the enemy ship with a slightly closer view. So you can watch your own railgun munitions splash down when they finally arrive. I like that you can hit spacebar to swap to a simpler, idiot's view of the battle. Not that it saved my armada of poorly equipped space losers from certain death.

The ideal way to play would be to use the 60 in-game days before your big boss battle arrives to buy low and sell high around the map for lots of credits, then gather as many brutal frigates as possible, and line up multiple squadrons ready for the final starbrawl. But when is life ever ideal? I launched my fleet of four dickheads straight towards the most highly paid (ie. dangerous) bounty, got into a fight that boiled two of them to death, then promptly ran out of fuel as I hopelessly tried to understand how trading works between systems.

In the end, I panic-bought the only vessels I could. A couple of cargo haulers and some corvettes. I was ready to quit and not see things through to the bitter end, until I realised you can name your ships. The shitshow must go on, I thought, as I proudly sent the following vessels to their grave.

The Battle of Steam Next Fest. After Action report.

Oh No - an Ika Class Lancer Corvette
Burned by lasers until rust-brown and fully dead.

Oh Dear - a Zhen Class Lancer Corvette
Killed by a kinetic barrage from an enemy ship called the "Spidercatcher" who sat arrogantly still for most of the battle, blithely shooting round after round through the hull of its victim even long after it was deceased.

Haulin' Sausage - a Von Neumann Cargo Hauler
Slowly barbequed by lasers from 94km away.

Meatlocker - a Magellan Cargo Hauler
Tried to escape; caught and lasered by a flanking enemy. 

Milkman - a Von Neumann Cargo Hauler
Flew straight at the enemy despite having no weapons to speak of. Instantly vaporised.

Wonk Wonk Wonk - a Copperhead-class Cataphract Corvette
I lost track of this ship seconds into the battle but I presume he did his absolute best, god bless our lads.

God's Own Space Shotgun - a Copperhead-class Cataphract Corvette
Actually fired back, chalking up one, two, or three kills, it is absolutely impossible to say precisely, because everyone I know has died.