I have never been a fan of the voxel games that have been popping up over the past decade. However, I am always on the lookout for an excellent space sandbox. Avorion, a space sandbox, just released 1.0 last month and has received some pretty positive user reviews. Aside from my general distaste for games where you spend hours customizing detailed ships, I found Avorion to be a great experience. There was a bit of a learning curve at first, but it was very easy and surprisingly fun to build your own chunky spaceship. All the usual space sim stuff is there: you can mine asteroids, trade space commodities, and watch and participate in battles between procedurally generated space empires. What's really impressive is that you can choose your own ship. If you like spheres, you can create them really easily. If you like long, streamlined ships, you can do that too. (I like spheres.)

Developer Boxelware offers a pretty amazing experience for an indie in a crowded genre and is a good example of a game where Early Access actually worked. Piloting a ship strikes a nice balance between Newtonian astrophysics and familiar controls for those who don't like full-blown simulators. The world simulation is not as deep as other games, for example, and the economy is not as dynamic, but as a quirky excursion into building custom spaceships and busting pirates, I found it a winner. There are plenty of players in the review who have spent hundreds of hours building and running vast space empires. As an added bonus, the games are all single-player and multiplayer.

Avorion is available on Steam and the official Avorion website.