Watch an hour of Squadron 42 gameplay, complete with dogfights and spacewalking

You can now watch an hour of gameplay from Squadron 42, the single-player section of massive space sim Star Citizen. After showing off Mark Hamill's character in the week, developer Cloud Imperium Games streamed it in action yesterday, including sections of dogfighting, spacewalking, shooting, stabby stealth and exploration.

The video, above, starts off with the main character walking around a Navy (the good guys) vessel before zooming off on a rescue mission to an abandoned moon outpost. It's a good demonstration of just how large, and how diverse, this game is going to be, and there's no loading screens splitting up the action. The voice acting is generally believable (although the cockney villains are a little jarring), the space combat looks suitably frantic and the visuals are predictably impressive.

But there's clearly still a long way to go. We still don't know when Squadron 42 will be released but judging by the video, which is 'pre-alpha gameplay footage', it won't be for a while. The frame rate is choppy in places and some first-person animations are awkward. I also can't stop noticing the strange view-bobbing: your helmet UI moves up and down as you walk but the world behind doesn't, which makes no sense. 

If you want, you can watch the video with developer commentary below instead.

In other Star Citizen news, the 3.0 alpha build of the main game is now available to all backers on the public test servers. It's a huge update that add tonnes of new features to the game, many of which we've written about here (and the full change log is here). For instructions on how to update your game, click here.