The Mandate caught my eye a few days ago and media interest has significantly grown around it these last few days, with people like TotalBiscuit and Angry Joe endorsing it. Taking a look myself I too find myself very intrigued at the possibilities of this game. The Mandate is a sandbox RPG in space where you captain a Mandate starship with a full crew that you must recruit, nurture and command properly in performing your duty as Captain of this starship.

There are already a couple of technical demos for you to play with. One showing you the massive amount of story and lore they’ve already introduced into the game and the other being a starship tech demo where you get to customise the layout of your ship and then have fun blowing it up. What really impressed me about that demo though was the level of detail.

In pretty much every space game that has shields involved, it’s a finite number that goes down as it takes damage, no matter what part of the ship is hit. In The Mandate, the shield bubble that surrounds your ship will weaken at the point it takes fire, opening up a hole in the bubble dynamically. If you stop firing, the shield will slowly regenerate and the hole will disappear. Should the shields fail, you then hit the hull which again will take damage, stripping away the hull and showing you the inner decks of the ship. Take a look at these screenshots to see what I mean. Or better yet go to their kickstarter page and try it yourself.

But thats just the technical side of things, the heart and soul of this game will be you flying around the galaxy as captain with a crew you must maintain. In this sense you are taken to a top down view of the interior of your ship as you walk around the ship, interacting with your crew. When the action comes to space combat,  it becomes a space combat simulator with all the cool technical details I mentioned above.

There’s more but the easiest thing to do is to visit their kickstarter page and see for yourself what the game may offer! They are almost at their goal of $500,000 with just 7 more days to go at the time of this article. Go look!