Chris Taylor and his team at Gas Powered Games don't take time to rest it seems. On the heels of the release of their acclaimed RTS game Supreme Commander earlier this year, the development studio is going back to their action-RPG genre with Space Siege for publisher Sega. We got a chance to see an early build being played at E3 earlier this week.

If you think that Space Siege is going to be Dungeon Siege in space, think again. The folks at Gas Powered Games are keeping some aspects of their original title (one big world with no loading times, isometric third person viewpoint) but other aspects are far different. The story of Space Siege concerns Earth exploring other planets via vast colony ships. The first reaches an alien planet which has an alien race known as the Kerak. Unfortunately, these guys think humanity shouldn't be going out into space. When the colony ship returns to Earth, the Kerak follow and then decided to completely destroy Earth and everything on it.

Not every human is dead yet, however, which is where your playable character Seth Walker comes in. He boards another colony ship and leaves before being wiped out. However the Kerak follow him and board the ship. The entire single player game takes place inside the vast colony ship with Walker (that's you) trying to survive and keep humanity from being completely killed by the aliens.

One big thing that makes Space Siege different than Dungeon Siege is that you only control Seth Walker during the entire single player campaign; there is no party of other characters to control. You do have the help of a friendly robot who can assist and help you fight against the alien threat (he's already been deemed the "cyber-donkey" a reference to the mule in Dungeon Siege) but aside from the robot you are all alone against the aliens. Another difference are the cybernetic additions you can put on your character on the game to increase your abilities and skills. There's a big drawback, however, as the more "cyber" you become the less human to turn out to be. This will likely affect what kind of ending you get to experience.

Our brief gameplay demo showed the character exploring a section of the colony ship which has the industrial look of the Alien-Aliens series of films. The game has a real vertical sense of place; you can look down and see that the ship is not only vast but tall with tons of levels to explore. Visually the game is looking sharp as well with great looking textures and visual effects. However, we didn't get to see much in terms of gameplay yet. We saw a couple of brief confrontations with a pack of spider-like creatures that Walker and the robot took out with ease but aside from that we can't comment on how the things like the cybernetic implants truly affect gameplay.

While the single player portion of Space Siege will have just one character, Gas Powered Games has plans for multiplayer co-op missions that will be different than the single player missions. A map editor for the game has yet to be decided upon (the Dungeon Siege games did include a map editor so we are hoping this comes to pass.

Again, this game is in its early stages so there will likely be a lot more to report on Space Siege in the months leading to its release in 2008. For the moment, however, Gas Powered's new RPG is one of the most promising PC games coming for next year and we can't wait to learn more about it.

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