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Empyrion - Galactic Survival
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Eneba, Empyrion - Galactic Survival pairs a tracked low price with a broad sandbox: build vessels and settlements, explore planets, and gather what survival demands. Solo play and multiplayer co-op support different plans, while the interface includes English and Simplified Chinese. Check that this mix of open-ended construction and resource management suits the kind of space adventure you want. With $19.99 on Steam, $18.99 makes this offer a lower-priced route into the same space-building and survival sandbox.
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K4GEmpyrion: Galactic Survival Standard Edition Steam CD Key
GAMIVOEmpyrion: Galactic Survival EN/DE/FR/IT/PL/NL/ES Global-91%from~ $1.76(~ €1.56)ALL-TIME LOWBuy nowAll-time low ~ $5.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $0.002024-10Current Low Across Stores~ $1.00Eneba
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
DLC
01About Empyrion - Galactic Survival
Empyrion - Galactic Survival combines space exploration, construction, survival, and first-person combat in a sandbox galaxy. Build ships, stations, and settlements, reshape planetary terrain, gather resources, craft equipment, and manage food and oxygen while exploring different worlds. Play solo or join multiplayer, where players can form factions and cooperate or fight. Steam player reviews: 78% positive from 29,231 reviews.
Credits
Developer
Eleon Game Studios
Publisher
Eleon Game Studios
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.002024-10-10 · Epic Game StoreBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | — | — |
| English | Yes | — | — |
| German | Yes | — | — |
Show 5 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | — | — |
| Russian | Yes | — | — |
| Italian | Yes | — | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | — | — |
| Greek | Yes | — | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play modes
The Steam PC version supports single-player and multiplayer, including co-op.
Language support
Interface support includes English and Simplified Chinese. Full audio and subtitle support are not listed for those languages.
Building and survival
Survival involves gathering resources and managing food and oxygen; a separate creative mode focuses on building without those survival concerns.
03Frequently asked questions
What can you build?
You can construct capital ships, fighters, planetary settlements, and space stations, piece by piece.
Can I change planetary terrain?
Yes. Terrain can be deformed to make settlement sites, dig for resources, or create tunnels.
Can I use community creations?
Steam Workshop blueprints can be downloaded, customized, and shared.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
No Man's Sky with actual content.Show moreShow less
7.5 hours at review1,054 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access · Received for free
Not recommendedSteam player
UPDATE (Jan. 2024): Empyrion now has paid DLC. Even better, EGS has partnered with the Tencent-owned Funcom for "marketing." The announcement thread attracted criticism and was, of course, locked. Shills insist this unholy union can't possibly result in monetization like battle passes and microtransactions, because ... come on, guys ... Empyrion isn't even the type of game that can work with a battle pass. Neither was Conan Exiles, but uh ... never mind. Oh, and concerns about spyware from a Chinese-owned corporate arm of the CCP are, like, totally unfounded conspiracy theories. It's funny that this new DLC features "updated melee combat" with swords (which I'm sure will be brilliantly animated and have nothing to do with Eleon's new partnership with the maker of Conan Exiles). Meanwhile, awful gunplay and movement don't even get mentioned. Instead, we're told Funcom grants the "opportunity to raise the bar for both the quality and quantity of our content." What that means is anybody's guess, but something like Zirax Coins, a Galactic Emporium and a Galaxy Pass wouldn't surprise me. I'm out of space, so this is probably the final update. Buyer beware. UPDATE (July 2022, v1.8): After not playing Empyrion since posting this review (nearly 2 years ago), I recently reinstalled and clocked just under 30 additional hours. Nothing I originally wrote here warrants revision, and I still don't recommend the game to anyone seeking "galactic survival," but I tried to give the current version a fair shake. * Some of the graphic changes result in a game universe that's downright beautiful at times. The gas giant's rings, as visible in the skies of the starter moons, are a stunning sight, and all the terrains I've encountered so far have been interesting and plausible. Characters are still blocky abominations, but the universe itself is a looker. * Unfortunately, performance continues to degrade, even though the PC I play on now is far superior to the one I used for Empyrion back in the day. This is further evidence to me that the "released" version of the game was just another alpha, and it arguably still is. * Eleon has attempted to craft a story, complete with a brand new tutorial, NPCs and interactive dialogue. It's crap. The writing is trite, boring and amateurish, like it was written for kids, but with none of the charm or clarity one would expect from a competent children's author. * Not only is the writing bad, but it is presented through a UI that is an eye-bleeding mess of colored text and exclamation marks. * Water is now animated and looks nice, but still has no discernible physics. Drowning at the bottom of a lake? Just dig a hole. * There are some new weapons (like a crossbow and flamethrower), but none of this matters since the combat and first-person mechanics still fall prey to all the criticism I expressed two years ago. * The Empyrion experience remains of amateurish quality compared to many similar titles. It can still be fun in co-op, but the devs have done very little since v1.0 to actually make the game better. Making changes =/= improvement. Original review below. ----------------------------------------------------- Until today, Empyrion was in Early Access for five years, and I suspect it will remain in an EA state for years more, if not perpetually. I've reached high-tier survival maybe a handful of times in all the years I've played this title, with most of my 600+ hours having gone into early to mid-game efforts whenever a new alpha drops. That's not to say I don't play for fun. I do, almost exclusively, and I wouldn't keep checking in if I thought Empyrion sucked completely. FWIW, the building system is engaging, and exploration can be loads of fun in co-op. However, there's a notion going around that players are somehow unreasonable when they're critical of Eleon Game Studios or the game after X number of hours played. A certain fanboy/moderator would apparently have everyone believe that his own 16,000 hours played is somehow reflective of the immense quality of this game, and anyone who has hundreds or thousands of hours is in fact a living testimony to Eleon Game Studios' unrivaled greatness. Meanwhile, in the real world, Empyrion is clunky, bug-ridden, amateurish and frustrating even at its best. I'm usually fine with that. Kenshi is one of my favorite games of all time, after all. But "You played X hours and got your money's worth, so shut up," is not an argument. Version 1.0 is not a complete game, and shouldn't be portrayed as such through deliberately confusing manipulations of common game dev nomenclature. However, if "shut up" is the official fanboy/moderator/developer position, then my official position is a negative review, and a strong recommendation to look elsewhere for sci-fi survival. Few similar games do as much as Empyrion on such a massive scale, but nearly every game I can think of does what it does, within its own scope, better than Empyrion. - The first-person mechanics are perhaps the worst I've ever seen. Playing Empyrion doesn't feel like moving around as a character, but rather gives me the sense of a camera on wheels. Animations are ugly or nonexistent for basic tasks. It would've been a damn shame twenty years ago. Today it's inexcusable. - Characters are hideous and hideously animated. Despite the first-person woes, don't even think about playing this in third-person. - Combat is an uninspired, impact-lacking mess. Weapons feel like BB guns, and even saying that feels like an undeserved insult to air rifles. If there's one single gameplay element that kills my Empyrion joy faster than any other, it's the awful, pea-shooter combat. This is unforgivable, because combat is central to the game unless you're only in it for creative mode. - The AI is rock-stupid and blatantly plays by different rules. Enemies can magically "hack" (take over) your base from long range if they can't reach your core, and their base and ship weapons are superior to player weapons in almost every way. Fighting against NPCs is essentially a matter of learning how to cheese. Recent attempts to create end game content have exacerbated this problem. - Unity Store assets are still commonplace. I mean ... whatever, I guess. I couldn't afford to make my own game assets, either. - Physics—what physics? - Flight model—what flight model? (It's been brought to my attention that I should point out there technically is a so-called flight model. Sadly, there's no real sense of mass or weight. Never was, and neither the "flight model" nor atmospheric engines that were added with it changed this. The same floating camera phenomenon that applies to walking/running also applies to every class of vehicle. I say this as a flight sim fan who thinks Space Engineers and No Man's Sky both did a decent fakery job with flight, and I would have been fine with something similar in Empyrion.) - Bugs. Everywhere. Various systems are glitchy. - No volumetric water. Dug a hole at the bottom of a lake? Congratulations, you've made a permanent air pocket that you can build on and live in just like on dry land. This also means you can't create a Minecraft-style backyard pond, or build a Subnautica-style underwater home. I mean, you *can* build underwater, but it's just depressing. - Canned environmental sounds, probably from the Unity Store (I can't confirm this). It's weird to be on a completely alien planet, but hear crickets and howling wolves. This is all stuff one would expect of an ALPHA product, of course. If you just want to build stuff or walk around on some same-y alien worlds, it's hard to say Empyrion isn't worth twenty bucks. It's huge with lots of moving parts. If you're looking for a deep game with polished (or even competent) survival and action mechanics, investing time in Empyrion might leave you some combination of irritated, bored and sad. Review subject to change, but I wouldn't bet on it.Show moreShow less
619.8 hours at review3,271 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
SMALL UPDATE Jan 2016 - Check comments for details! [ SUMMARY ] : Space Engineers meets some StarMade and the exploration aspects of Shores of Hazeron. I DON'T RECOMMEND buying this game right now, unless you're a HARDCORE FAN of sandbox and space games. I really mean that. Don't say you weren't warned. I DO RECOMMEND watchlisting or following it if you like sandbox games in general. If you want more details, read further to understand. [ BACKGROUND AND DISCLAMERS ]: - Me and Empyrion: I got to know Empyrion through Scott Manley's Youtube Channel 2 weeks before the Steam Early Access Release, and decided that I would most definitely give it a go. I went through ~97% of the game - I got all the resources I need and explored (probably) everything, but didn't build a Capital Ship yet. - The Team: Empyrion is made by 3 indie devs. They pushed through a failed kickstarter, and here is the (early) result. They seem nice, and determined. - This Review: I'll first describe the game with as little personal notes as possible, and in the end I'll give my take on whatever I find necessary. This way, I save both your time and mine! :) [ REVIEW ] : > INTRODUCTION: Your capital ship crashes on an alien planet. Left with a escape pod, you must gather resources and craft your way back to space. Crafting, mining, building, hunting, surviving, running for your life when things go wrong. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Empyrion provides a very immersive and fresh experience for those who like survival and sandbox games. > GAME FEATURES: SURVIVING is your first priority and your constant goal in Empyrion. You must find Water to generate Oxygen, hunt, scavange or forage for food, and find Promethium Ore to make Fuel to power all your operations! MINING is crucial. You'll need to find resource deposits and strike the earth in order to build your base, vehicles and personal items. Mining is done by equipping your drill and digging - vehicles don't mine yet. CRAFTING and BUILDING is a main part of the game. Much like Space Engineers, every final item is comprised of components which you must craft first. Removing a block will return its components, so remember to bring your Removal Tool to rip those expensive components from ships and bases you find in your expeditions! Building your base is straightforward, and can end up looking pretty nice. VEHICLES are critical for survival, exploration and progress. You can build a hovering Ground Vehicle, Small Vessels for interplanetary and atmospheric flights (as well as small-scale combat and raids), or Capital Vessels for (not yet implemented) intergalatic travel and serious combat operations. COMBAT can happen on ground or in space. You can also be inside a ship or on foot, which makes things great: what if you leave your ship, but get flanked or surprised by the enemy? You can also hunt wildlife for food and resources. The EXPLORATION vibe is definitely there. Even on initial release, you can't help but wonder what awaits you when you look at the night sky - or when seeing a weird building from a distance when you're still a survivor with just a escape pod. Maybe you could cannibalize or take over whatever that thing is, and turn it against your enemies (or against the unsuspecting wildlife)? It's something I was looking forward in a survival sandbox space game for ages. > GAME ASPECTS: GRAPHICS: Very good for an indie game, but could definitely look better. Yet, I wasn't bothered by it. SOUND: Decent, but needs mastering, attention and variety - which are probably planned. INTERFACE: Simple and straightforward, if you have played any similar games you'll be ready to go in minutes. The lack of a tutorial or proper in-game instructions WILL make things harder and more tiresome for non-hardcore fans. Be ready. GAMEPLAY: Survive, mine, craft, build, fly. The gameplay and progression already feels nice, and the game doesn't take you by the hand. You're free to do whatever, whenever, however you decide. BUGS AND ISSUES: There was a big number of release issues and bugs, some people even had their savegames corrupted or fallen out of the world. I didn't experience anything gamebreaking like that, but there's a lot of minor things that can get on the way of your fun. Still, it feels more polished than many Early Access titles I've played. > PERSONAL NOTES: = Positive: - Regarding GAMEPLAY: Even though story and quests/missions are planned, I love how YOU choose where to go. There's an obvious way to go about things ("now I need X ore that's only available on Y planet in order to build Z item"), but you can ignore that and end up getting end-game gear by your own means and creativity. I REALLY hope this doesn't change with development. - Random, non-scripted "events": Sometimes, circumstance might surprise you. You might be distracted and hear a weird noise, and a squad of drones are coming for you..and you forgot to craft a better gun and more ammo. This sort of stuff is what could potentially make Empyrion the best space sandbox out there, but it only happened one time..and I was probably lucky. - Currently, I believe food and oxygen requirement is well balanced: you won't have to run every 5 minutes back to base, but if you neglect your needs you might find yourself in deep trouble. Which is always fun. - The game has a good selection (for an Alpha) of weapons. Choices for personal weapons include Assault Rifle, Sniper, Rocket Launcher and Laser Rifle, and ships have both (automatic/manual) Turrets and fixed weapons like the Gatling Gun, Rocket Launcher, Plasma Cannon or Rail Gun. = Negative: - The Unknown: There's a LOT of work to be done before it makes sense to buy and play this game. How commited is the team? What is the roadmap and milestones? Will the annoying stuff ever get fixed? There's a lot of questions like these, which are critical for EA titles to answer first. - Annoying bugs/half-made features: Crafting takes a LOT (and I mean, A LOT) of time and requires you to manually craft EVERY SINGLE COMPONENT. Removing blocks take AGES. Mouse-wheel doesn't work. Flight model feels bad. And so on, and so forth. This makes playing the game rather painfully after the first hour or so. Is player convenience a priority? - Space-Flight and Space-Combat must be redone from scratch. Both as an astrounaut or in a Small Ship, space-flight is terrible and space combat is insanely bad. Getting near an enemy in space will break your controls and make you lag and wonder what happened. - Community, Hype and Fanboying: This kills games. I've seen criticism be bashed simply due to hype or 'fandom'. There's a real HUGE amount of things to be done and fixed, and dodging/dismissing feedback and criticism is not the way to go. I didn't see much developer interaction (on Steam forums), and I hope people get more of it. > CONCLUSION: The core concept and gameplay from this Early Access title definitely deserves to be noted and followed, but it doesn't make sense to buy it yet - unless you're really, REALLY into it. People who played the very first moments (before building an actual base, vehicles, and getting to space) loved it - and I did too. But after these ~2 first hours, the current state of the game presents itself. There's A LOT of work to be done in Empyrion, more than people seem think or talk about. There's many critical issues to be fixed or developed, and it's still unknown wether the ACTUAL content (planned storyline and progression) will make any sense. There's no human/alien 'sentient' NPCs or any trace of a story/quest system, and the space part of the game is really terrible and not developed at all. This is why I can't recommend you to jump head-first into it. Therefore, put your expectations in line, take a deep breath, and make your choice. Thanks for reading! :)Show moreShow less
50 hours at review511 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
Players , prepare the Lube and get ready for Battlepasses and cosmetic DLC's Funcom is in the house. Oh yes also, they are censoring every thread or comment warning players about what funcom really is. This is just so pathetic. RIP empyrionShow moreShow less
136.4 hours at review734 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I have a story about this game. This is not a copypasta, but a real experience. At the time of this post, I have 742 hours of gameplay. Most of that has been spent playing cooperatively with 3 close friends. We'd start new universes on the hardest difficulty, working together to find materials and scratch out rudimentary base defenses before the drones, Zirax, and various indigenous tribes came and tried to make jewelry out of our organs. We had wild adventures in the wilderness on our hoverbikes, fighting off raptors and spiders and zombie aliens. Digging up ancient ruins. Cleansing horrible biological experiments gone wrong. Exploring strange new worlds. Seeking out new life, new civilizations. Stealing their stuff. Committing war crimes against the Zirax Empire. Don't worry, they totally deserved it. We built elaborate underground bases. Turned mountains into fortresses. Constructed capital ships that were works of art. Space-based ship construction facilities. Giant farms with jump drives. Mining outposts on distant moons. Starfighters, cargo hoppers, unstoppable killing machines. We owned the stars. Especially the stars we took from our mortal enemies, the Zirax Empire. Freaking lizards. Die. One of these friends was enduring frequent complications from leukemia recovery. He would mine entire asteroids by himself due to being constantly awake from steroids. He loved to call it roid rage, and that joke never got old. A few months ago, his body finally gave in. He passed away peacefully, surrounded by family. We wore Jedi robes to his funeral. I still have our dedicated server sitting on the box I hosted it from. I keep wanting to fire it up and continue the adventure, but you have no idea how difficult that is now. Anyway, Eleon has created something truly wonderful here. There have been bugs and development struggles over the years, but no other game like it has captured the essence of cooperative gameplay for me like this one. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you figure out the tech tree and get proficient at slaughtering wildlife, it really opens up. Some of the blueprints in the workshop are absolute works of art. For the more creative types, you can build anything you can imagine, paint it any color you want, strap engines and weapons to it, and even put gaudy flashing signage and obnoxious blinking rave lights all over. The planets are beautiful. The sunsets/sunrises are beautiful. The galaxy is beautiful. You can leave your base behind and frolick about the galaxy, living out all your favorite space pirate fantasies. You can pretty much do anything but build a submarine (for now!) Oh, and there are dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs. Most importantly, you can have a great time with your friends. You never know how long that will last. Make it count.Show moreShow less
742 hours at review460 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really want to recommend this game. I want to talk my friends into playing it with me. I have put a lot of hours into playing, spread out over many years. I have even been interested enough to polish some of my in game designs for posting on the Steam Workshop. My stupid conscience won't let me give it a thumbs-up though, because this game is clearly another example of a great idea that isn't getting the time and resources it needs to realize its potential. There are a multitude of these half-realized dreams on Steam, and it really makes me question the Early Access concept in general. Players like me pay to fund development of these games, instead of paying for a finished game, with no guarantee that the development will ever actually happen. Maybe we paid for some dev to live and work for awhile and then just move on to another project. Let's call that what it is: A donation to an artist, not the purchase of a product! Empyrion does some things well. It really is a galactic survival game, where you can begin as a castaway astronaut with nothing but some hand tools, lost on an alien world. You can explore neat-looking landscapes, harvest materials, fight AI people and monsters, and build bases and working vehicles from scratch. You can construct a spacecraft, and fly seamlessly from planet surface to orbital space, and then from there fly freely to any nearby asteroids or moons. When you develop sufficient technology, you can build ships capable of traveling faster than light and visit other planets and, beyond that, a whole galaxy of star systems with their own planets. You can build everything from tiny ships to huge ones, and stage battles between spaceships. It does all of this well enough for me to keep coming back once a year to see how development is coming along, despite my continual disappointment with the state of the game. Basic game mechanics that you use for harvesting and constructing feel clunky and unfinished. Some basic things, like the system for creating artificial gravity on ships and space stations, have been left unfinished for years, with no indication from the devs whether they will ever be improved on. Recent updates seem to be focused on minor visual tweaks (just now adding schools of fish to bodies water?), which really should have been done years ago. The "experience" and player progression system is slapped-together and serves no purpose. You could remove it completely and not change the gameplay at all. The end-game is almost non-existent here. Once you get the ability to build whatever you want, you realize how few block choices there really are in the game. Big bases and ships end up feeling empty, there aren't a lot of devices with actual functionality, so spaces end up filled with useless decorations just to make the space look like it serves a purpose. AI currently is 2-dimensional, interaction with AI players is minimal in the extreme, and all AI creatures behave more or less the same in combat, meaning you can use the same tactics in every danger situation and win easily. Changes voted up by regular players on the game forums are just ignored by the devs when they don't feel like addressing them. Instead of adding art to the game, the devs should be polishing and filling out the game mechanics, making the basic game feel more varied, and giving it a meaningful sense of progression. In this kind of game, players can make their own art, but they can't fix a broken foundation. Get to work for real or throw in the towel!Show moreShow less
1,218.7 hours at review640 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I bought Empyrion on sale and didn't really know what to expect from an early access Alpha game. I find myself really enjoying the game and even if development stopped tomorrow I figure I've more than got value for my money. It plays very well for an Alpha. In over 200 hours gameplay I've only had one crash and the game recorded and sent a report to the devs. The next day I had an email asking for more info - good dev response. Updates are coming through regularly and add more content and fix some of the bugs. It's a survival game. The back story is that in the near future humanity has kind of ruined good old Earth. The melted Antarctic ice cap revealed a crashed Alien ship. Using tech from the ship Earth poured all its resources into building several colony ships and sent them out to find Empyrion - a paradise shown on the incomplete alien starmaps. You are the captain of one of these ships. A hyperdrive malfunction throws the ship off course and you crash into the planet you choose at the start of the game.You, the sole survivor, land on the planet in a survival pod with limited supplies. You have to gather resources and establish yourself on the planet. One objective would be to return to space and proceed with your original mission to find a new home for mankind. You could also just chill on the planet until you run out of resouces - it's all up to you, the game is open and doesn't force choices on you. Aliens will attack you on sight and you can raid their bases for resources and equipment. Some of the wild life is hostile, some is not. A good tutorial guides you through building your first base and your first vessel. I really enjoy Empyrion's open design environment - I think that is what makes the game. Although there are a few basic blueprints, you have to design and build your own bases and ships. I find the testing and improving of my designs to be a lot of fun and very engaging gameplay. Building is intuitive once you get used to the block system Empyrion uses for construction. You can make a blueprint of your designs and use it to build a duplicate. I also believe blueprints can be shared amongst players although I have not done this. A good example of Empyrion game play is mining. You need a lot of resources to build stuff, and aside from common metals like iron, cobalt, copper, silicon, gold, etc., Empyrion has included some exotic "alien" metals that you have to go off-planet to find. Unlike some games, extracting the ore is not as simple as walking up to an ore body, clicking it, and walking off with your bags full. In Empyrion first you have to find the ore which involves physically coming within 500 metres of the ore body, so be prepared to travel a possibly hostile planet. Then you have to tunnel into and excavate 3D ore bodies and by the time you are done you will have a really DEEP hole in the ground. How you approach this can determine whether you return to base with a load of ore or starve to death at the bottom of an empty mine, having expended all your drill fuel and being unable to return to the surface. Oh yes, you can starve to death in Empyrion. You can also suffocate in space if your oxygen runs out. You can die if you fall too far. Raptors will eat you. Aliens will shoot you. Plants will poison you. It is a survival game after all. It's not all danger though. You can kick back on the gun deck of your base, enjoying a veggie burger and space fries while watching the rising sun blaze a river of gold across the lake. Great sunrises and sunsets in this game! In its current state you can travel to several planets, moons, and asteroids within the system. I don't know what the devs have planned for the game, but the warp drive panel and maps have grayed-out slots for galactic travel. There is lots of content in the game that is not yet explained in the tutorial. Even after 200 hours, I'm still finding cool stuff by accident. I've often thought "I wish there was an easier way of doing this" and then by "fat finger accident" found that there was an easier way. Cool game! One drawback is that this game is sucking up way too much of my time. I recommend it highly! Update: March 11, 2018 It's been a couple years and over 2000 hours of gameplay since I wrote this review, so it's time for an update. There have been lots of changes in the game since I wrote the first review; it has been an interesting ride. First of all, this is NOT one of the sad abandoned early access games that litter the Steam store. The devs are extremely active and very responsive to the player community. I began playing this game on Alpha 3; it is now on Alpha 7 and the devs are working on Alpha 8. Each release has progressed the game in the direction chosen by the devs but has also incorporated improvements suggested on the forums and addressed deficiencies identified by the player base. Regular updates roll out within each major release to fix bugs; the devs are very active. When I wrote my first review I had only played single-player mode. Since then I have only played multi-player mode. As other reviewers have noted, once you have visited all the planets and looted most of the alien POI's the SP game runs out of objectives. That's where multiplayer kicks in. The MP servers are a vibrant mix of PvP and PvE players and the ship and base designs that people come up with are a source of endless inspiration (and amusement truth be told). Hard-core PvP players utilize game bugs to design ships and bases for maximum advantage, other players set up PvE trading empires to make credits not war. Lots of stuff to do on the MP servers within the player communities and each server seems to have a unique atmosphere based on the concept of the server owner. I've played on many servers and all have been a great experience. That being said, there is one caveat for MP. Everything is built of various shaped blocks, each block composed of a number of triangles. One of my medium-size Class 4 capital vessels contains 12000 blocks and 26000 triangles. As this ship moves through space the computer has to calculate the position of each one of the triangles. If you want 60 FPS, it does this 60 times a second. No problem in SP witha decent computer, but imagine 10 of these ships in a MP playfield. They are in combat and shooting at each other. Triangles are being destroyed, so the server has to include that into the calculations. The load on the server is , erm, heavy to say the least. If you want a good MP experience you have to chose a server that has the equipment to handle the load. This is why many of the more populated servers have limits on ship size and the number of bases and ships each player and faction can own. It is also why the "universe" is composed of a number of individual playfields and isn't seamless. The devs have made major improvements in this area to reduce the load and eliminate lag and I personally haven't run into many lag issues in Alpha 7, but it is still a potential problem. Overall, a great game with a fabulous MP player base and community. Every time a major Alpha release rolls out there are so many changes it's like getting a whole new game and I get to play it all over again! I continue to sink way too many hours into this game!Show moreShow less
2,588.8 hours at review413 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
This was an amazing game... once. On its current path, that no longer applies. I don't write reviews - ever - so if you're reading this, consider how drastic the cumulative failures have been in order to wring this out of me. The devs have not only stopped listening to their players, but are turning a deaf ear to their own staff now. Whatever Empyrion Galactic Survival might have become, that game is dead. Just to highlight a few of the massive flaws currently at play: -A "CPU" system they claim is meant to encourage vessel "specialization," which does nothing of the sort. Instead it restricts builders, penalizes creative / aesthetic design, and thanks to rare loot-/trade-only components, gates larger ship progression behind insane grind and/or unfathomably low drop rates. Those big, awesome ships you see in the screenshots? A portrait of lies - don't expect to build anything like that under the current system. -New "flight mechanics" that tie your ship's maximum speed to its weight / acceleration. Build too big or carry too much cargo, and you'll find you can't even move fast enough (IN SPACE) to achieve Warp velocity. -A complete disregard for feedback if it isn't what they want to hear. The devs have a three-part release system consisting of "Closed Alpha" testing, "Experimental" testing, and then the Public release - this may as well be a straight-to-public method since time and again they have pushed ahead with bad systems despite overwhelming negative feedback during each phase. If you had asked me even a year ago, I'd have heartily recommended EGS as one of the best in its genre. The building system is superior to any other I've encountered, and the ability to paint and texture individual block surfaces puts this game head & shoulders above the competition. Yet for some unknown reason, the developers are utterly determined to choke, restrict, and limit that creative potential through arbitrary and unnecessary game mechanics. Should this change, I will gladly revisit my review and alter my recommendation accordingly. But for now, I can only say that after 1800 hours, the game that I played and enjoyed is dead, and what's left is no longer worth supporting.Show moreShow less
1,794.6 hours at review565 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
RecommendedSteam player
It's like No Man's Sky and Minecraft had a baby and got ALL the good parts from each parent, and none of the bad parts (yes, there's some things that need work, It's early access still but its continually improving) 1200 hours in and still no regrets on spending the $19.99. Absolutely worth the price. If I could only recommend one title out of my library of games, this would be the one I'd recommend.Show moreShow less
1,210.5 hours at review373 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Not recommendedSteam player
I've played this game for over 2400 hours, so I've been with it since way back. I finally decided to give it a negative score because of how lax, childish and unresponsible programmers at Eleon are. Seeing how much I played, you may think I enjoyed the game enough already, but I tell you I've been frustrated more or less all the time at the little things. No one can say I've been impatient with the final verdict, but finally there it is. Please decide if factors I deem as shortcomings are what would make you withhold buying this game or not. Follow the details of how I arrived at the final verdict. The idea for a game is superb. Not unique, but superb. It may have been unique four years ago, but not anymore. Basically you build whatever you can imagine from predefined functional or decorative blocks, be it a building, spaceship or ground vehicle, manage resources and engage in conflicts with NPC or player factions if you wish to do so, defend your base from enemy raids and so on. These are the things that basically make the game. There's also creative mode where you can enjoy stress-free building with unlimited resources. You can play a single-player or co-op scenario (really only two are included, with one recently hidden and unable to be played) or enjoy a survival freedom. Features - there are many that made the game enjoyable for me and from version to version game was improving with few new ideas. Some features were revised and polished and some introduced. I won't be listing them as already many did before me, but I'll give some examples to allow anyone to picture how the game changes: 1) The biggest recent welcome change was huge improvement of the AI, compared to previous versions, but this only brought it on par with some B-class FPS games out there. Still, good going. Previously we've dealt with meat lumps that stood in place, shot back at players with aimbot-precision and ability to shoot through walls. The latter still happens, albeit not so often. 2) The most incomprehensible addition was block groups of decorative antennas, where there already was a block group of decorative antennas that draw enormous amounts of power for such a non-functional block. Instead of fixing that they introduced new blocks group. Also, instead of making decorative antennas functional, they introduced Wi-Fi blocks as yet another, separate block of antenna. 3) I liked, however, some adjustments introduced in recent Alpha 10 that improve overall balance, like combining color and texture tool into one, Sound and visuals - If I were to assign a score to the look-and-feel, then: 1) 7/10 for graphics in terms of beauty, not taking into account MANY glitches, texture flicker and generally bad, bad optimization (I'll explain this statement later), the game is just nice to look at. 2) Music is 3/10 and PLEASE add custom soundtrack possibility or randomize music on a playfield or make pauses between loops, because listening for hours to the same short melody is kind of brain-numbing. 3) sound effects are 8/10, not taking into account MANY sound glitches that happen at times. Sound effects are more than appropriate. Implementation. It's at most mediocre, to bad sometimes. This is where this game fails big-time and reason for my final, not-recommended vote. Every new iteration of the game introduces multitude of bugs that break anything - from previously saved games to previously working features, making some of structure prefabs that were previously working not so working anymore in various ways, including airtightness, defense capability and texture placement/orientation. And this is not because of new features - because of bugs or badly implemented. The most irresponsible thing is to heavily rely on community to be testers and make them pay for this ever-unfinished product anyway. I mean beta-testing (or in this case Alpha-testing) is a job, Eleon should PAY US for testing for them. They however release a test version that is out there for weeks, then make it publicly available and immediately need to release several bugfixes, that need to address failures reported by players in order to make the game playable again. You may wish to say to me "you knew what were you getting into when you bought an early-access game", but this game is early-access for nearly five years, which at this point is just a story for Eleon to cover inability to provide a proper product to the masses. If you would stick with them for some time, like me and actually clock up some time in-game, you would realize what I mean. 1) Most prominent dread are exceptions, the likes "argument out of range" or "null object reference". These are purely programmers' errors and are persisting since forever at every corner. In time, some are fixed but some remain forever, even between game versions. This level of errors is what made most of Windows 95 and later exploits possible. This is really heavy proof of zero quality-control at Eleon whatsoever. Learn already and don't accept programming school dropouts. 2) Second most annoying thing is the low framerate and graphics glitches even on a high-end gaming gear. I've seen many games on Unity game engine, but this one behaves, by far, the worst. The more time I play in one go, the more glitchy it gets. Previous versions became unplayable, newest Alpha 10 with some patches already, ends up totally desynced (e.g. you press a button, you hear the sound of an action, you wait for about a second and see the result of that action on the screen). You can move a mouse about a milimeter and end up turning 180 degrees because of engine hiccup. It would not be so bad if it didn't happen at two to three second intervals. That's what I called bad optimization. 3) Third most annoying errors are blocks with mismatched hit-boxes, or as they call it "colliders". Basically you see a block or object you can walk-through even though you should not be able to, or you DON'T see anything and you can't walk past some blocks or you CAN shoot and destroy some block. These are all retractable blocks like guns, turrets, landing gears, weirdly enough not the doors. You can also fly a ship and collide with another objects with parts of the ship that aren't there. Take for example a block that isn't full cube (e.g. flat wall or a ramp wall, window or shutter-window). If you build a ship with that block on the floor you would like to land it on these blocks, you realize afterwards though, that the ship lands above the ground as if a window on the floor was a perfect cube. 4) Last mention goes to AI-controlled vehicles that don't follow any physics or aren't able to receive damage (bullets fly-through), fly with destroyed fuel tanks (literally no fuel), ability for player ships to be able to power down above the ground and be hung there indefinitely (exempted from planet's gravity), AI-controlled characters walk freely with no gravity in space stations and when falling out of space station into deep space they stop at some invisible floor in space not far under the station and stay there even when killed. The last list is but a fraction of many outstanding "features" that finally made me fed up with the game and lose all hope. I was patient, waited some years. I was one of those people who reported bugs in Eleon forums, I was filming, screenshoting, reporting and only two of my many bug reports were fixed. This for me is a clean indication that programmer level is wannabe at most. So final thought is no matter how awesome idea you have, when implemented by incapable it's always a failure. I know you don't need to be some philosopher to arrive at this conclusion, still, at some point you refuse to face the sad truth and start to believe in miracles. Apparently, these don't happen often.Show moreShow less
2,463.6 hours at review493 people found this helpful
Written during Early Access
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.