''Miner Wars 2081'' is a

six degrees of freedom Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) refers to the six mechanical degrees of freedom of movement of a rigid body in three-dimensional space. Specifically, the body is free to change position as forward/backward (surge), up/down (heave), left/right ...

action-survival space-shooter

simulation game Simulation video games are a diverse super-category of video games, generally designed to closely simulate real world activities. A simulation game attempts to copy various activities from real life in the form of a game for various purposes such ...

produced by Keen Software House. The gameplay offers a choice of single player,

co-op A cooperative (also known as co-operative, co-op, or coop) is "an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-control ...

, and deathmatch

multi-player A multiplayer video game is a video game in which more than one person can play in the same game environment at the same time, either locally on the same computing system ( couch co-op), on different computing systems via a local area network, or ...

. The game is set in the year 2081, 11 years after the destruction of all planetary objects in the Solar System. The story introduces the player to many types of missions: rescue, exploration, revenge, base defense, theft, transportation, stealth, search and destroy, pure harvesting or racing.

Gameplay

The player controls a mining ship on a trek adventure across the

inner Solar System The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...

. ''Miner Wars 2081'' is an action-oriented game, set in a fully destructible and open-world environment, which remains persistent as players complete missions or play online with others. Realism and survival is the key aspect of gameplay. Inventory and the way players use resources such as fuel, ammunition, oxygen, ore, and weapons is important when surrounded by dozens of warring factions. The game features both competitive and co-operative multiplayer. Players are able to complete the entire story campaign with multiple online allies.

Plot

The game is set in the year 2081, 11 years after the destruction of Earth. Being so early in space technology and colonization, the people of Earth are ill-equipped to survive in space indefinitely. Mining colonies previously established in space allowed some 120,000 people to live in space and continue the species.

Development

Development on ''Miner Wars'' began in 2002 as a side project by Marek Rosa, the founder and CEO of Keen Software House.About us
(archived) In 2009, the project began full-time work and a production team was formed. Originally planned for release in 2011, the production team continued to grow in 2010, and there are currently around 10 core developers both working internally at their headquarters in Prague, and externally in America. The website has undergone several changes, and collects regular feedback from gamers through the forums. ''Miner Wars 2081'' is running on the VRAGE

Voxel In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. I ...

game engine built and tailored specifically for the title. The company is also working on the development of VRAGE 2.0, the newest version of the engine and as it has been announced it will be used for the development of their project called '' Space Engineers''.

Release

In October 2010, the

pre-alpha A software release life cycle is the sum of the stages of development and maturity for a piece of computer software ranging from its initial development to its eventual release, and including updated versions of the released version to help impro ...

version of ''Miner Wars 2081'' was released to the public, with a free demo version and discounted pre-order version. ''Miner Wars 2081'' is available for Microsoft Windows, and was later released on

Xbox Live Arcade Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is a digital video game download service available through the Xbox Games Store, Microsoft's digital distribution network for the Xbox 360. It focuses on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent ...

. In October 2012, it was approved for distribution by Valve's Steam Greenlight program. As of January 17, 2013, the Steam version was patched so that no internet connection is required for single player, but still required for multiplayer and to access the editor. Non-Steam versions however, still require an active internet connection during installation and game play. Valid keys from other vendors can be registered on minerwars.com where a Steam key can then be generated at no extra cost .

Source code

In March 2013, the game's

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

has been released for easier

modding ''Modding'' is a slang expression derived from the English verb " to modify". The term refers to modification of hardware, software, or anything else, to perform a function not originally intended by the designer, or to achieve bespoke specif ...

purposes only. Content and assets are still proprietary and commercially sold.

Reception

The game received mixed reviews from critics. The most negative review was published by Eurogamer which gave 3/10. Eurogamer criticised Keen Software House that they didn't keep promises to players. Another point of criticism was technical processing and story. The most positive review was published by ''Gamesite.Sk'', which gave the game 77%. It praised the story, world, engine and co-op mode of the game. On the other hand it criticised that the engine wasn't used fully, there were bugs and that the game is sometimes stereotypical.http://www.gamesite.sk/pc/recenzie/13429-miner-wars-2081-recenzia Slovak

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.minerwars.com/
Full engine and game source code
on

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2012 video games Commercial video games with freely available source code Cooperative video games Indie games Microsoft XNA games Open-world video games Steam Greenlight games Video games developed in the Czech Republic Windows games Windows-only games Xbox 360 games Xbox 360 Live Arcade games Zero-G shooters Science fiction video games Video games with 6 degrees of freedom Video games set in the 2080s