This is no Eve Online, nor is it meant to be. It's Vendetta Online, a 7-year-long space massively multiplayer online game now playable on Android tablets.
While there is much that separates the twitch space combat, and NPC alien infested outer limits of Vendetta from the purely player driven machinations of Eve, one can serve as a sort of proof of concept for the other.
And good timing, with Eve Online developers CCP saying they're looking into porting their game to mobile devices too.
I've just started poking around at the outer edges of Vendetta on my Android Xoom, I'm very impressed with what I've found so far. This is a deep game with an intuitive interface that works well, very well on the large screen of a tablet.
Currently the game isn't playable on the iPad or Android phones. Instead the developers decided to focus their energies on tablet, smartbook and netbook devices with displays of 1024 by 600 or better. They're also focusing on devices that use NVIDIA's second generation, dual core Tegra.
That's for a couple of reasons, according to the developers. This is a full blown, PC first, MMO. The port is meant to deliver the same, full experience. So the devices running it need to have the ability to deliver meaty graphics and have quite a bit of processing muscle power.
The team says they've steered clear of the Apple devices for several reasons, including Apple's initial decision to not support self-updating applications, the bread and butter of subscription based MMOs. The team say they're reexamining that decision now.
Currently Vendetta Online is a glimpse into a world of platform agnostic massive gaming. Whether you play this game on an Android device, a Mac, a PC, a Linux-based system, you get the same experience and you are playing in the same persistent world.
Imagine what that could mean for games not just like Eve, but World of Warcraft.