Causing quite a stir yesterday on social media fronts, developer CodeHatch has released a very early alpha build of their open-environment, sandbox building game titled StarForge. Inspired by Borderlands, Warcraft, and Minecraft, StarForge lets the player create their own world in a rich space filled environment.

StarForge is a game about gathering resources, building bases, buying weapons, using strategy, and destroying your opponent’s bases to win the match. It is real time and set in a first or third person perspective.

Set on an alien planet, the theme is high technology, mixed with old world building mechanics. Earth has been depleted and the humans transferred as much technology and resources as possible and left on a one way mission to populate another planet. They must forge a new star.

While the current release is somewhat buggy and quite exhausting on even the most high-end computers, when you are able to play, the game offers a very different approach to your usual block building scenario. You no longer dig by squared blocks, but by using a vector that can be swept across, manipulating the environment similar to Ubisoft's recent title From Dust.

Tiles are still present, with 3 different variants available in the alpha. With the ability to toggle from first-person to third-person, you can easily manage your castle of doom that reaches into space. One of the great things about StarForge is that it offers no limit on where you can go, allowing the player to discover new environments and even build in the vacuum of space.

If all this has made your palate wet with interest, AusGamers has a local download available of the current alpha version. For a more in-depth preview, check out the developer diary below (HD here) showing off what is currently available in the alpha as well as some new features being worked on.