Galak-Z: The Dimensional is not your typical shmup game. It evokes cheesy anime styles from the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s looking quite awesome. The creators are saying their inspirations for the game are Macross, Star Blazers, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica.

The story goes like this – there’s a war between mankind and the Imperials, an alien race. You play as one of the last remaining humans and your mission is to defend your mother ship and collect resources to repair the mother ship, while traveling around other star systems.

Here’s the twist, the game is an open world 2D shmup. Yes, the game has a sandbox structure and will reward players who are smartly gathering resources to gain new weapons, abilities and even new ships. The open world levels are procedurally generated. There are some planets that are hard coded/designed by  the devs that feature more scripted and story rich missions.

There are three factions in the game: humans, Imperials and Space Pirates. Space Pirates will attack both humans and Imperials so you could use that to your own advantage while playing the game. All dialogue in the game will be available in both English and Japanese.

All actions are physics based as seen in the trailer, meaning there will be inertia to everything in space. The game features high-end AI called Cyntient, so hopefully that means the enemies will be very challenging. The devs are considering a permadeth option for the more sadistic players.

You can check out the wicked awesome debut trailer below:

Check out some screenshots below:

The game is slated to come out next year for the Playstation 4.