I talked a bit in the past about how it felt to play Space Engineers, but as promised, I am now going to tell you all about the game on a more technical level. First, I need to make it clear that the game is still in early access and the current version of the game is not necessarily indicative of what the finished product will become. I have about 30 hours of play time, and my buddy in the game is sitting at about 40 hours. This gives us about 70 hours total of toying with the game as we have been spending time on building and harvesting different things. With that said, I feel like I have only scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. Still, I have a pretty solid understanding of what most players will experience in their first week or two of the game and can give you a pretty solid preview of what to expect and help you decide if the game is worth dropping $20.
Space Engineers is Minecraft in space, and at the same time it is nothing like Minecraft in space. More of a Lego simulator than a full on game in its current state, the title brings plenty to the table to make it worth consideration. To be clear, this is a game – it is just more focused on building and gathering than anything else. You do have options to turn on environmental dangers, like meteor showers, and ships will pass by at a distance that is not threatening. If you get close enough though, you better be ready because most pack a heavy amount of weaponry.
So, what does Space Engineers do that can’t be found in other games? In essence, you are working to build the spacecraft of your dreams. While my partner in the game built a pencil thin ship with a huge block of drills on the front (The Asteroid Stamper), I built a test ship which was used for our first battle (The ChipShip – named after a favorite T.V. show from my younger days). I had built a number of designs for a small drilling ship which was fantastic for digging deep into an asteroid, but once we had the resources built up the Asteroid Stamper became the default mining vessel.
Customization is Key
Enough about what we built and the adventures we went on for now, though. There are two modes to the game, Survival and Creative, in its current form. Creative mode requires no resources to build and is perfect for those that wish to just get in and start building massive starships, bases or whatever else they can come up with. Survival, on the other hand, requires you to harvest the materials needed to build everything in the world. You start with a set of tools required to mine, build, and breakdown everything in the game. Depending on your game mode choice – of which there are many – you will also start with random starting items such as a refinery and assembly, a survival ship or nothing at all.
Customization is the name of the game from the menus to the things you can create. Before starting a game, or at any time through the menu before reloading, you can customize the speed at which things happen ranging from realistic (slow) to 10x speed for almost every part of the creation process. Welding, refining and assembly were the options we turned up as we started to see that after a few days we had made very little actual progress in the game. This isn’t entirely the fault of the game, but likely more to do with the fact that we had no idea what to do while our ore was refining and assembling – besides more mining.
You are also able to turn AI ships on, which generally show up about 10km away from your location and rarely came close to us. These are basically AI NPCs that can be hunted and looted. Meteor showers are brutal if you build in the wrong area, as we did with our large platform which is going to become a space station at some point. Even with a number of Gatling guns protecting us from random showers, we still were hit more frequently than we cared to admit. Granted, moving the platform to another area would prevent some of this as most of the asteroids traveled through the same location, but my co-op partner in the game is a sun worshiper and wanted to be on the sunny side of things. We decided, for the time being, to focus more on building and exploring what the game had to offer than surviving non-stop meteor showers. With enough guns, and magnesium to build ammo for them, you can keep a place safe, but we weren’t at that point yet. This customization is a huge boon to the game and something that was greatly appreciated from the first time we played.
Endless Options
The wealth of tools you have at your disposal are staggering. It makes building an effective ship a puzzle in many ways. With conveyer belts used to transport harvested materials from a ships drill to its ejector (which is used to deposit the ore into a refinery automatically) you have to plan out your build from the start. Damage is a constant concern as getting close to the wall of a tunnel can beat up your ship based on the type of armor you use. Collectively, we have lost more than our fair share of essential and non-essential parts of our mining ships. This is actually a great deal of fun as we constantly have to reimagine our builds to ensure the craft is agile, well armored and productive.
There is plenty of room for self-regulation as well. I prefer to build ships that I can use from the first person view in the cockpit, but it isn’t necessary. A 3rd person camera will allow you to hide the cockpit behind a huge wall of armor and pilot it from outside of the ship. For me, this is against the rules. I have to build a ship that can be piloted from first person, but it is nice to see that the options are there. Really, it just opens up more creativity.
A Few Bugs Can’t Ruin the Experience
There are a few odd bugs here and there, and only a few are game breaking. Keep auto save on at all times. The strangest thing to me, so far at least, has been the physics of the game. In most cases, things work just like you expect. What threw me though is when my buddy was reworking his ship by dismantling sections at a time above our platform. With our gravity generator on, and his ship just a few meters above the platform, once he disconnected parts of the ship they simply floated away. Now I will admit that I am no physics genius, so it could very well be that the gravity is not able to pull something like that down, but considering that a stack of steel plates will not only fall, but punch a hole through a platform, the ship staying afloat – with no power mind you – seems counterintuitive.
Again, this game is early in its development and there is no roadmap available to see if this is something that is being worked on. The game has a solid foundation and is incredibly fun. Hopefully in the future we will see more AI to worry about as it attacks our locations. Nothing says a good time like the option to turn on space pirates that are trying to crush us and steal our stuff. For now, this is a robust and exciting Minecraft-esque building simulator set in space. It isn’t the prettiest game on the planet, but it does look good. What it lacks in graphical prowess and style it more than makes up for in creative freedom and countless options for customization. As of right now, I can’t suggest the game enough. I don’t know where it will go from here, and I think some choices could derail the project, but the developers seem to know what they are doing and I whole heartedly expect great things in the future for the title.