Hades' Star is a mobile MMO strategy, which kind of reminds us of EVE Online

Hades' Star has been in soft launch for a while, but is finally available for the whole world to play. What is it? It's a space fleet management strategy type of game, which kind of reminds us of EVE Online. Of course, it's nowhere near as crazy and has been designed for the mobile game lifestyle — it lends itself to jump-in, jump-out type of play sessions.

So, gameplay is pretty basic — you start off with a single transport ship and have your very own star system to colonize. This is your home base, which can't be invaded by other players — they can only pass by if they are allies and want to trade or help you out against attacking AI. The lack of danger may not sound very riveting, but it plays out nice in the mobile context. You can't be pinned to your phone 24/7, right?

Your control over your ships is pretty limited. You can only tell them to go from one planet to the other and choose the cargo they will be transporting from one place to the next. Your battle ships will automatically shoot at anything that gets in range and that's pretty much it. Again, this is more like a management strategy instead of an RTS.

To get in “neutral” zones, you build a timed gateway, which gives you 15 minutes to get to a random point in the virtual galaxy and steal valuable resources. You will meet AI ships guarding said resources, as well as another human racing for them as well. Again, you can't shoot at the human player's ships here, which we found a bit of a downer, but that might get unlocked later on? We're still pretty early in the game. So, the only PvP we got to experience was racing to steal the other player's resources while they are engaged in battle.

All that said, we had fun. The graphics are on point and the soundtrack has that right amount of “it's a lonely space out here”. It's a freemium game and you'll have to spend real cash if you don't want to wait for an hour or two for your battle ship to get repaired or your latest tech be researched. But oh well... we do recommend giving it a try!