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Crowd-funding sensation Star Citizen adds an FPS to its space combat

Cloud Imperium revealed the first-person shooter module for Star Citizen in the above video that debuted at PAX Australia. The ambitious, upcoming game is being developed in discrete modules — think of them as separate modes, but all tied together in the same overall system — allowing fans to get into the action before Star Citizen‘s massive feature list is complete.

The FPS demo is divided into two parts. In the first half, a four-member squad takes on some enemies in a close-quarters interior location. The action is pretty typical of sci-fi shooters with tech like mobile energy shields and EMP grenades to spice it up.

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Related: Star Citizen‘s insane $56 million crowdfunding total earns it a Guinness World Record

The second half, however, opens up when someone turns off the artificial gravity, leading to some zero-g combat right out of Ender’s Game. Plenty of recent shooters like Titanfall and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare have embraced more vertical play by adding in superpowered jumps and wall-running, but this takes that trend to a whole new level.

Star Citizen is the brainchild of Chris Roberts, who developed the cinematic Wing Commander games in the ’90s. It is one of several in-development games, along with Elite: Dangerous and No Man’s Sky, that embrace massively ambitious, open-world playgrounds in outer space. You can get in on Star Citizen now, with more to follow in the coming months.

Will Fulton
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Fulton is a New York-based writer and theater-maker. In 2011 he co-founded mythic theater company AntiMatter Collective…
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