Fight. Mine. Explore. Trade. Apple TV gamers looking to settle in and enjoy those four tenets of the 3D space combat genre have so far only had Galaxy on Fire: Manticore Rising to toy with. While the prologue to Galaxy on Fire 3 is good fun, it’s not a particularly deep experience, tasking players  with a fairly linear mission structure.

Stellar Wanderer on the other hand takes its RPG trappings a little more seriously, with Crescent Moon Games going so far as to label it a “Space Opera,” and promising over ten hours of gameplay in order to complete the main storyline. Throw in some side missions, mining and exploration, and Apple TV gamers should have a good few hours of gaming ahead of them.

These sorts of deeper, richer experiences are just what Apple TV is needing more of. As I described recently in my review of Red’s Kingdom, ports of simple one-touch iOS games are not what you sit down in front of your big screen for.

Crescent Moon Games have announced “next week” as the scheduled release for Stellar Wanderer on Apple TV, with it coming via a “massive update” to the iOS version which adds universal compatibility, and of course the “massive update” wording could also mean extra content, so fingers crossed on that front. I would expect it to hit Thursday or Friday, given that the studio (and prolific publisher) normally follows the established iOS release routine.

Good times ahead.