People and media say many things about Star Citizen, but as usual, the best way to judge a game is to try it for yourself. Later this week you'll be able to for free for a limited time.
Cloud Imperium Games announced last week that we'd have a new Free Fly Event this month, but now we know exactly when it starts, and that's on Thursday, February 8, 2024.
At the moment, the duration of the event has not been revealed, but if you want to see for yourself what the game is all about this is a good opportunity.
All you'll need to do if to create an account on the official site and wait until Thursday. Free Fly Events usually start at 10 a.m. PST. When the event kicks off, you'll be able to download the client and play for free for the whole duration of the event. Usually, it's over a week, or even closer to two.
The one important aspect that you need to keep in mind is that installing the game on an SSD is pretty much a requirement. Installing it on a regular hard disk drive will lead to severely degraded performance. Nowadays this is almost a given, but Star Citizen was basically the first PC game requiring an SSD to be enjoyable.
Incidentally, also starting on February 8 are two in-game events, Coramor 2954 and Red Festival 2954. They're the in-lore versions of Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year. 2954 is simply the current year in the Star Citizen universe.
You'll have access to the full alpha 3.22 build, which is the same backers play on, without limitations, so you can see exactly what the current state of the game is like. Incidentally, Cloud Imperium Games already revealed many of the features planned for the promising alpha 3.23 update, but that's several weeks out.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game that has received $663,342,347 in funding at the moment of this writing. Players have registered 5,060,986 accounts, albeit not all of them represent paying players. Many have been registered for Free Fly Events as explained above.
In 2023 the game received over $117.5 million in pledges. It was the biggest funding year in the history of the game, and the sixth year of consecutive funding growth.
Star Citizen is in active development exclusively for PC, and will also have a single-player, cinematic campaign titled Squadron 42. While it doesn't yet have a release date, we recently learned that it's feature-complete and it's currently in the polish phase.
