CitizenCon is the annual convention where all fans of Star Citizen come together to celebrate one of the grandest space exploration games we’ve seen to date. After a four-year hiatus, it returned with a two-day event held in Los Angeles at the weekend.
For those who have been following the Star Citizen journey, you would know that Cloud Imperium Games has also been working on a single-player game based on the Star Citizen Universe called Squadron 42.
Announced back in 2012, and with a few years of pre-development before that, the game has seen a total of 13 years of work-in-progress time and, announced at CitizenCon this weekend, we finally have some sort of news hinting at its completion.
While there is no release date yet, the team announced that “Squadron 42 is now feature-complete”. And they are moving into the “polishing phase” for the game. This is exciting news, as it means the team will almost be ready to announce an actual release date for me to pop into my calendar immediately.
Alongside the announcement, a 26-minute “show-off” video was played at CitizenCon.
A mixture of gameplay visuals, story cinematics and different in-game features are shown in the video. One scene in the boat reminds me of quite an early stage in the ever-popular Half-Life 2 game, while a lot of the space combat clips give me a strong sense of one of my all-time favourites, Freelancer.
We also got to see more of the physics puzzles that have since been implemented into the game for when players are on foot, and quite a few of the in-game actors, such as Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, John Rhys-Davies, Mark Strong, and Liam Cunningham.
With an announcement date on the horizon, we’re even more excited than ever to step into our space boots for Squadron 42.