I reckon you autobattler sickos will like Annihilate The Spance, probably you RTS nutters too

Spance! The final fronntier

The "spance" of Annihilate The Spance is apparently “an ancient, roiling storm of matter and energy” that harbours both “extreme and inexplicable phenomena” and “unfathomable riches”. I’m happy to discover this explanation, because at first I thought that “spance” was just a litigation-avoiding, supermarket rebrand of “space”. I was bracing to send the good news to developers Skyglow Softworks that, so far, nobody has managed to copyright “space”, though I’m sure somebody’s tried. Maybe, um, God?

It’s a relief to know that God won’t be suing Skyglow Softworks for breach of copyright, because off the back of two demo missions, Annihilate The Spance is worryingly compelling. It’s a mixture of space RTS and autobattler, wherein you construct bases that produce spanceships who autopilot towards the nearest and largest concentration of enemies. According to the developers, it’s inspired by the 2011 Flash game Obliterate Everything by CWWallis (RIP), which I dimly recall playing while I was running a browser game blog for AOL. Anyway, here’s a trailer.

As you’ve hopefully deduced, the rough flow here is that you clip modules for building, resource generation, and turret defence to the outside of your base core. It’s as though you’re growing a pearl from a chunk of asteroid dust. A pearl that proceeds to spawn huge armadas of spanceships. The ships range from zippy, brittle fighter craft through tougher, point-defence escorts to armoured cruisers and heavy beam artillery. You can give them waypoints by circle-painting an area of your base, then dragging out a line, but they’ll do all the warring themselves. You can also decide which shipyards produce what, and synchronise construction outputs to firm up your offensive.

It’s almost reminiscent of crowd control in Humanity, though the better comparison is of course another autobattler, such as Mechabellum. Nic will be spitting mad that I’ve played this before Mechabellum, after all his strenuous advocacy. And in fairness to Battlemaster Reuben, Annihilate The Spance doesn’t seem as polished: the controls and presentation are on the functional side, with drag-selection a chore when your base hits a certain size. There’s also a surprising amount of plot involved, with some robustly written, ponderously scrolling mission briefings that may annoy those who just want to see two rolling hillocks of spanceships, sutured together by webs of laser fire.

Still, I had a blast playing the demo last night – there’s a nice rhythm of fussing over construction, then sitting back to watch your cloud of astral locusts softly consume another base. It seems targeted at older players who get back cramp if they have to micromanage too often. The kind of older player who can remember the golden age of Flash. Awww.

The game’s out in early access today, boasting 22 campaign missions, two playable factions, 50 or so warships and 20 base structures. The 1.0 release, slated for end of 2026, will add a third playable faction, the remaining story missions, and a level editor. There’s still a demo on Steam at the time of writing.