It’s an expensive world out there but, if work is necessary to survive, what better way to spend the hard-earned cash on than a bigger spaceship?  Space Mercs is a simple arcade fly & shoot through enemy-packed skies, filled with ships that make up for their lack of brainpower by sheer weight of numbers.  As a space mercenary it’s your job to blow stuff up, whether that be drones that go down in a single hit or bigger ships with dozens of gun emplacements, and the reward is the cash necessary to buy bigger, shootier spacecraft.  Bonus targets are for Prestige, which enables upgrades, but so long as you’re fully engaging in the target-rich environment (blowing up all the things!) it doesn’t seem likely you’ll be short on access to new toys.

Space Mercs is coming to Steam at the end of the month but, if you’re curious now, there’s a demo available at itch.io ready to play.  It comes with three missions of varying difficulty and, while a bit rough around the edges, the core is already pretty fun.  The targeting reticle is surprisingly precise, allowing for reasonable targeting of distant enemies, and the energy system for weapons is simple enough that you don’t have to hoard the big guns but also can’t spam missiles everywhere.  The trailer below shows both external and cockpit views, the latter of which I wasn’t able to figure out how to access in the demo, and the “Invert Y Axis” button doesn’t actually do anything, but seeing as the game is over a month off from its July 30 release there’s plenty of time to address this.  It’s a good bout of arcade-style aerial dogfighting with some impressively large space-bases bristling with weaponry, but if all that sounds a bit much at the moment check out the trailer below to see the action in flight.