It’s easy to feel proud when you’re flying through space at 1000 meters per second. “Watch my spaceship going,” you tell yourself, “See how quickly it hits another small ship.” Building your own galaxy snowman from scratch in Space Engineer 2 brings a smile to those who once enjoyed making their 8 year olds still have mental access while clicking on the Lego Pod Racer and pounding each other on the carpet of their living room. That said, this is the exact extent to which you can do in the game so far. Build a “n” crash. All functions fit this opening paragraph. There is good reason to trust the developer’s ability to provide the rest of this craft and survival game. But for now it’s all core and no loops.
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It’s a very sturdy core, I should say. You can arrange examples of ships around space stations, or be unleashed in an asteroid stained by ship’s universe-stained asteroids floating freely between a world of large floating rocks. You will roam around, explore the station, and perhaps you will find the cockpit through the corridors of larger containers. Behind the joystick of a large cruiser, it’s difficult to resist the trademark laws of gaming marketing. He drives to another ship very quickly, watching the metal squat down like an empty fanta can under the hoof of a fat donkey.
Of course, destroying someone else’s sand castle is not as much fun as your own bulldozing. Creating a ship is a problem of flipping through the toolbar and creating a frame with light or heavy armor blocks present. Next, add the necessary thrusters, cockpits and gyroscopes to make the ship work. All of these items sit in an endless supply of magical hands in spacesuits, rectangular and jagged triangle edges of aluminum. The game is currently in “Creative Mode”, so it does not refine ore mining or materials. Only the building.
There is no tutorial on how to proceed with that either. You need to regularly soak the help menu to understand the many keyboard shortcuts you can build with a sense of ability. It’s a little overwhelming at first. Especially if you come to this even if you have no experience as a space engineer, like me. But circulating through the library of works with a concentration of hungry chimpanzees looking for termites in his buddy’s hair, ultimately (literally) clicks.
Immediately, you will understand the importance of keeping the CTRL and accurately aligning the blocks along a convenient grid. You discover a “symmetry” plane that helps cut your work in half. Also, being able to create a prefab is the simple (and sometimes, sometimes) dragging the box around what you want to copy, then paste it somewhere and save it as a “blueprint.” Within an hour or two, the construction process itself felt surprisingly intuitive and sinister.
There is friction. For example, the “Undo” and “Redo” functions that developers cite as innovative new features can accidentally delete a block and try to undo it, for example. It’s also no go to undo the wrong paint gun spray (the developers have already said this works internally, so they should be implemented immediately). And it’s hard to see how some of the pieces fit together. For example, a snippet of the window pane should not allow as much module freedom as I would have liked.
In short, it’s a creative sandbox of bare bones, but the bones are strong and healthy. Similarly, it is a place for undirected wanderings and playful experiments. There are health, power, oxygen and fuel meters, but they don’t need to be restrained yet. You can build refineries, Medbays, and cargo containers that look cool, but there is no way to use any of them meaningfully. You can crash the ship and shut down the reactor dramatically in a hurry! But in reality, there is no difference. The ship does not need power yet.
This makes this feel like a 25 pound building block toy now, rather than a goal-oriented game. It’s certainly a very cool toy. I built two ships. The first was a sneaky drag racer with eagle colours and spiky fins (the unconscious influence of childhood wipeouts). The second ship was more nautical – an interstellar catamaran with solar sails. The huge cargo ship class thruster I’m not tied up to my ass and not bound, means that this machine will be 1000m/s with a horrifyingly short burst. I added a small crow nest on the mast, but placed the sheet at an unpleasant angle. This is space and there’s no problem with the crew being on the side.
Except that there are no crew members for a while. Multiplayer has not yet been added and will not appear until after a significant number of updates, including planets, volumetric water, mods, and steam workshop support. Judging by the developer’s reliable update history for the first space engineer and the DLC for DLC (a game RPS that I liked to play cooperatively for months), I look forward to it all.
But it’s not here yet, that’s it. For those cravings for the direction and propulsion of the survival meter bar, inspiration for cooperative operations, or sweet crunch building factories that are more efficient than ever, this minimal alpha will not provide what you want. However, if the only adult in the house approaches as if he were going to an hour out of the pub with a colorful brick box raised to the floor, then you can have a very happy time to come up with your own architectural project. Design a torus-shaped holiday resort on top of an asteroid on the edge of a large needle. Cobble brings together a space fighter that looks like an annoyed squid. I’ll definitely paint off the offensive red of Mars.
As a newcomer in the series, it’s hard to know if someone craving more space engineers will be excited by the birth of a new but familiar playground, or disappointed by the relative lack of things to do. Keen Software House has a lot to do before the sequel rivals its own predecessor. This is a common problem for creative games with long lifespans (it took Crusader Kings 3 to properly appeal to me just because Ck 2 appears to have already done everything I wanted).
This problem is not with a fully formed sequel. But this is not the case. Early Access reveals blank space to longtime fans who correctly look back at the first space engineer and observe that they’re doing 10 times more for about half the price. There is good reason to hope that this sequel will be the decisive way to weld together planet hopping death traps for your companions. But until you can see a little more, you won’t blame the astronauts for staying on the planetary side.