Hell Galaxy: while Star Citizen banked its billionth dollar, other studios were shipping spaceship games

We already wrote it in our Rogue Eclipse review: when modest developers keep shipping good space combat games, the interminable wait becomes hard to justify. Hell Galaxy is another exhibit in that file, and it lets us update a figure.

Because in the meantime, the threshold was crossed.

The figure, now verified

On 24 May 2026, Star Citizen's crowdfunding officially passed one billion dollars, reaching roughly 1,004,122,732 dollars contributed by 6.54 million people. Our Rogue Eclipse review spoke of a sum well beyond half a billion, which was accurate at the time and is now considerably below reality.

One detail is dizzying: it took more than ten years to reach 900 million, and only six months to add the final hundred. The complete game, meanwhile, is still not out after fourteen years.

We will go no further in judgement, and we will not label the project, because that is a matter for courts rather than reviews. But the weariness is understandable, and it can be put politely: when a studio with a billion dollars still is not delivering, the games that do ship deserve a look.

And so, Hell Galaxy

First, something you may not have known: the game is not new. It has been in Early Access since 31 July 2025, developed and published by the Italian studio Italian Games Factory, and its reception is decent at 76 percent positive across eighty reviews. It is the kind of title that slips under the radar for want of a marketing budget, which is precisely the problem.

Its founding idea is excellent and has nothing to do with the persistent-universe ambitions of its cumbersome neighbour. You are a raider, a former convict accused of murder, stripped of your human body, your consciousness fused into the hull of a bio-ship. You do not pilot a craft, you are the craft. Flesh is a memory, and what remains of you lives in the hull, the modules and the guns you bolt onto yourself. There is no way back to human, only forward into something deadlier.

That fiction feeds directly into the mechanics, and this is where the game gets clever. Every encounter is a fight on two fronts: your hull can be torn apart, but so can your mind. The ghostly creatures of the Neterun galaxy threaten your sanity as much as your armour, and you have to shift in flight between balanced, aggressive and defensive states to adapt. The real question in each fight is therefore not only how to survive, but which part of yourself you are willing to risk: the ship that keeps you alive, or the mind that keeps you you.

The rest follows: full customisation starting from the cockpit, modules to install, resources to gather, ancient ruins to search, rival raiders to meet, and a transhumanist weird fiction setting that holds together well.

What to know

The game remains in Early Access, which is why we are not scoring it here, and its reception, while not triumphant, is solid for a production of this size. Good news, it is available in French.

The reservations belong to the format. A solo space shooter built on customisation and exploration must prove it has enough content to last, and the review sample remains modest. The sanity mechanic in particular will only be worth something if it forces genuine trade-offs rather than adding a second bar to watch.

But the essential point lies elsewhere, and it meets your irritation head on. This game exists, it plays, it costs the price of an indie title, and it offers an idea nobody else had. Perhaps that is the answer to fourteen years of waiting: stop waiting.

After a year of public release, reception settles at 76 percent positive across eighty reviews, an honest Mostly Positive. That is the score of a good niche game that has not yet convinced beyond its natural audience.