This article is incomplete
Some sections are missing or need additional details. Help improve it by contributing.
ZeroSpace launched into Early Access on July 20, 2026, as a PC exclusive, priced at $39.99. A 10 percent launch discount brought it to $35.99 through August 3, 2026, and it went back to full price once that ran out. The team has confirmed there are no console versions planned. Early Access means the game is playable and substantial at launch while continuing to grow with updates afterward, and the launch opened to a Mostly Positive reception that has since risen to Very Positive, with 1,059 of 1,302 reviews positive as of late August 2026.
Try It First: Steam Next Fest
Ahead of the paid launch, a free playable demo was offered during Steam Next Fest, which ran from June 15 to 22, 2026. Demand was strong enough that the team kept the demo open after the festival: ranked matchmaking closed at the end of Next Fest, while the Campaign, Galactic War, and Custom Games stay available until closer to the July 20 release. More than 40,000 players tried the demo during the festival, one of the event's most-played. The demo lets new players try the game before launch, and the developers encourage wishlisting and word of mouth. Chinese-language support was added to the demo for players in Asia. Every game mode is playable in the demo, and anyone who played a match during Next Fest earns an exclusive in-game title at launch. By the close of Steam Next Fest the game had passed 250,000 wishlists.
What the Demo Includes
The Next Fest build is a slice of each pillar rather than the full game:
Campaign: the opening three story missions.
Galactic War: a Next Fest mini-season with three commanders and six missions.
Versus: three factions, five mercenary groups, and eleven heroes to mix and climb the ladder.
Survival: hold out against the Grell onslaught for as long as you can.
What Is in at Launch
All three pillars are present from the start. The single-player Campaign ships with its opening set of missions, the cooperative Galactic War runs on a seasonal shared map, and competitive Skirmish offers both ranked and cooperative play. The launch also opened Galactic War: Season Zero, the mode's first seasonal event.
Campaign: Act 1 of the story, with 12 missions at the Early Access launch, drawn from a full 1.0 roster of 15 main story missions, 10 hero loyalty missions, and 15 side story arc missions.
Factions: the Early Access build makes all four main factions playable, the Protectorate, the Grell, the Legion of Truth, and the robotic Xol, plus all six mercenary factions.
Forces: more than 150 units and buildings, led by named commanders drawn from every faction.
Modes: the Campaign, the Galactic War, Survival, and Skirmish, including a ranked 1v1 and 2v2 ladder alongside co-op, PvP, and free-for-all formats.
Counting those leaders depends on where you look. The official faction pages name fourteen commanders across the four main factions and the six mercenary groups. The Early Access description puts the number of selectable heroes at ten. Both figures describe the same build, counted differently.
The Xol Faction at Launch
The robotic Xol is the fourth main faction, a synthetic civilization of self-evolving machines that became playable for the first time at the Early Access launch. It stays early in development, so it sits out ranked matchmaking until further community balance testing, though it can be played in skirmish and the campaign. For players trying the game for the first time, Getting Started walks through the basics.
The Early Access Build
The official Early Access description sets out what the launch build contains. The single-player side opens with Act 1 of the campaign, 12 story missions alongside interactive dialog with your crew. The cooperative side adds 10 co-op missions, with the enemy factions, compositions, and objectives generated procedurally. Skirmish can be played against AI across eight difficulty levels or against other players. The build lists four main factions, six mercenary factions, and ten heroes, together offering more than 90 unique units and heroes.
The First Weeks of Early Access
The studio shipped patches at a heavy pace straight out of the gate, starting with a day-one patch and settling into a rhythm of a large weekend update backed by smaller mid-week fixes. The studio has said the positive review rate sat as low as 66 percent on the first day, with half the negative reviews pointing at the interface, and had recovered to 77 percent by early August. Beyond bug fixing, the opening stretch added real content:
Pirates arrived in the Galactic War, seizing part of every alliance's territory and forcing commanders to clear them before a planet earns influence again.
An item system entered early preview, dropping equipment from finished missions to be equipped from an Arsenal.
Unlockable portraits were added through several routes, including a duo portrait for winning alongside a friend, stream-watching drops, and the Season Zero rewards. The stream drops went live on August 1, 2026 alongside a profile tab for linking a streaming account, and the first two were the She Who Stalks and Loi'Kru portraits.
Balance passes reached every faction and mercenary group, with a stated aim of reining in the fastest openings and giving players more time to react.
Localisation expanded, with Turkish and Vietnamese joining the supported languages.
Quality of life work covered reconnecting to matches, replay playback, match history on profiles, and an option to turn off the production queue mechanic.
Survival was also moved to the end of the mode list and explicitly marked as beta while it continues to be worked on. For the ranked structure that arrived alongside these updates, see Skirmish.
Updates Since the First Fortnight
August 11 brought the largest structural change to combat since launch. The Harvester armour type was removed outright: harvesters and extractors moved to Medium armour, and every unit bonus that had been written against Harvester armour became a flat 50 percent bonus against Medium instead. The same patch swept balance across all four main factions and all six mercenary groups, and pushed a major pass over the Chinese text.
August 14 was smaller. Grell bases now start with full biomass, and on the Galactic War side difficulty began scaling every reward rather than only some of them.
August 19 was a performance update. An animation rewrite covered twenty-two units, cutting the cost of drawing large numbers of them at once. The same patch added an attack-ground hotkey and a self-cast modifier, let you mute an opponent from the lobby portrait or the in-match info button, fixed a networking fault that could push a player past 1,000 ping, and cleared a freeze that hit once someone had roughly 1,000 replays saved.
For a dated record of what each patch changed, see Update History.
The Road to 1.0
Starlance plans to stay in Early Access for about a year, though that may change with player feedback. The published roadmap charts the path to the full 1.0 release: more campaign and co-op missions, new skirmish maps supporting up to 4v4, additional factions, co-op commanders, and mercenaries, an expanded Galactic War with more crossover between modes, and further events and character interactions in the campaign, building toward the complete cinematic story. The studio has said the price may rise during Early Access as content and features are added.
The studio has also set out how it means to ship that work. In a community update in early August 2026 it put the cadence at weekly changes carrying bug fixes and minor balance tweaks, with content such as missions, commanders, factions and heroes held back for larger drops roughly once a month. Writing about the month ahead, it said it was planning a new Galactic War season, more units, and additional campaign and co-op content. That is a stated plan rather than a dated announcement: no second season has been announced. The same update put the game past 350,000 wishlists, up from the 250,000 recorded at the close of Steam Next Fest in June.
The published roadmap splits the work into four tracks and separates what is already in Early Access from what is held for 1.0 and beyond.
Still Landing During Early Access
Campaign: meta progression, faction reputation, save and load, and character relationships.
Co-op: meta progression, Galactic War special events, and a stronghold mission, on top of the three commanders and ten missions already in.
Versus: replays and spectator mode, plus limited dedicated servers.
Other: the Survival game mode, player profiles, unique unit voicelines, and polish passes over effects, animation, icons and the in-game interface.
The roadmap also labels the Xol as a beta faction in the Early Access build, which lines up with the studio holding them out of ranked play while balance settles.
Held for 1.0 and Beyond
Campaign: the complete story with multiple endings, a customisable ship layer, companions, and a new game plus mode.
Co-op: new commanders and missions, formal Galactic War seasons, and guilds.
Versus: full 2v2, 3v3 and free-for-all modes, the seventh mercenary faction, new maps, and new units and heroes.
Other: a galactic editor, game mode variants, onboarding tools, further interface customisation, a clan system, profile customisation, controller support, and new game modes.
New units, heroes, and ongoing balance and design work are marked as continuing past 1.0 as live service rather than stopping at the full release.
Platforms, Publishing, and Languages
ZeroSpace is a Windows PC exclusive with no console versions planned; the full specs are listed under System Requirements. Starlance Studios self-publishes the game and works with a regional partner to release it across Asia. Twelve languages shipped at the Early Access launch. Two more followed, and by August 1, 2026 the supported list stood at fourteen: English is fully voiced and the other thirteen are text only, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Vietnamese, and several European languages.