Hell Galaxy is a space shooter where you pilot a ship as a human consciousness connected to a mechanical bio-ship. In this form, you explore the galaxy, fight rival raiders, search abandoned ruins for resources, and upgrade your ship with new weapons and modules.
Before we dive into the trailer, it’s worth noting that combat is built around more than just managing shields and firepower. You have to switch between different combat stances depending on the situation, while supernatural enemies can attack your sanity instead of just your hull.
The game spent some time in Early Access, and it seems like it has finally perfected its dual combat system. Or has it?
Learning the Combat
As we mentioned in our introduction, Hell Galaxy revolves around three combat stances: balanced, aggressive and defensive. Switching between them is one of the core mechanics. Staying in one stance throughout a fight is a quick way to get yourself destroyed. Every stance comes with its own strengths and weaknesses. Success depends on recognising what the battle is asking of you and reacting before it’s too late.
During one of our early encounters, we stayed in the aggressive stance because we wanted to bring down an enemy raider before it had a chance to regroup. The extra firepower worked exactly as intended, stripping away its armour in no time, but it also left our own ship exposed. The moment the enemy returned fire, our hull disappeared far quicker than anticipated. Talk about a harsh lesson that dealing more damage doesn’t always mean you’re making the right decision.
When fight erupts, we’re not only lining up shots and avoiding incoming fire, but also reading enemy behaviour, repositioning around larger ships, and deciding whether it’s worth pushing forward or backing off for a few seconds. A shot prediction system helps lead moving targets, but, again, landing accurate hits still requires careful positioning. The whole thing is like a dance, a joint effort of push and pull.
It’s all fun and games until smaller raiders are joined by larger warships, capital ships and massive creatures that attack in different ways. Different weapon and module combinations also influence how we approach each fight. A lighter setup lets us dart around incoming attacks, while heavier modules encourage a slower, more deliberate playstyle that can absorb more punishment. As much as we sometimes wanted, there’s no single strategy in Hell Galaxy. Each encounter demands to adapt our build and our combat stance.
There Is More Than One Health Bar
Remember the psychological aspect that we mentioned earlier? That’s where Hell Galaxy starts to separate itself from more traditional space shooters. Not every enemy is interested in destroying your ship. Some of the ghostly entities lurking around Neterun can bypass your armour altogether and attack your sanity directly. Every encounter becomes a battle on two fronts, It forced us to think about both the condition of our bio-ship and the state of the mind trapped inside it.
We could come out of a firefight with barely a scratch on our hull, only to realise our sanity had taken a serious beating. Other times it was the opposite, with our mind remaining stable while our ship was falling apart under sustained enemy fire. Different enemies threaten different parts of us. So, while we’re trying to stay on target, avoid incoming fire and reposition around larger ships, we’re also watching which type of damage is coming our way and changing our stance to deal with it.Encounters against mixed groups become especially tense because conventional raiders can pressure our hull while ghostly enemies chip away at our sanity at the very same time. It can be too much. There were more than several occasions where we simply couldn’t process everything quickly enough.
Underneath this overwhelming barrage, there’s a satisfying combat. Reading an encounter correctly, switching stances at the right moment and surviving an attack never stops being intense.
Building Our Own Ship
Progression in Hell Galaxy is closely tied to exploration. As we move deeper into the Neterun galaxy, we search abandoned stations, forgotten ruins and ancient Neterunian structures for the resources needed to research and install new modules.
These new modules are divided into different categories, including defensive, scientific, exploration and special technologies. Each of them unlocks new passive bonuses, support abilities or combat options. We felt need to experiment with different combinations so that we could find a setup that matches the way we want to fight.
You started very weak, bordering on pathetic even, but by the end of our playthrough, our bio-ship looked and handled nothing like it did at the beginning. We enjoyed making the gradual transformation from vulnerable exile into a heavily armed raider. It was all done in a very clever and organic way.
Losing More Than Our Ship
Hell Galaxy isn’t the easiest space shooter to get into, but if you stick with it, you’ll find quite the unique experience. The combination of traditional dogfighting, shipbuilding, and supernatural attacks gives it a strong identity of its own.
Developer: Italian Games Factory
Publisher: Italian Games Factory
Genre: Space Shooter / Action
Platforms: PC
Release: August 12, 2026
Version Reviewed: 1.0
Review Platform: PC
Leave a comment