Let’s play Space Engineers: build your dream spaceship and set sail for nowhere
This post is the third in our Early Access Experiments series, which will look at a bunch of Steam early access games before pitting them head-to-head and asking whether these games are good for consumers, and whether this is a monetization model that should be adopted by more Asian developers.
In theory, Space Engineers is a game that pushes all of my buttons. It allows you to build any space station, large, or small space ship you can imagine. It allows you to paint these things, and outfit them with weapons. It allows you to float around with a jetpat, inertial dampeners, and a machine gun. Intrigued? Check out a little Space Engineers and see if this one looks right for you.
If you’re not interested in watching, Space Engineers in its current state is more of a creativity/building tool than an actual game. You can build ships and space stations with an assortment of block shapes and items, and while there are relatively few shapes the things you can make by combining them are pretty much infinite. If you like being creative and you’re a fan of sci-fi things, you’re going to love making ships in Space Engineers.
Right now, that’s about all you can do, though. Once you’ve actually built your ships, there’s not much to do but blow them away with rockets and start building new ones. The game is clearly being built with more than just making ships in mind — the ship-mounted and regular weapons are evidence enough of that — but there are big pieces of the game still missing. The biggest? Interesting things in space. Yeah, I know real-life space is mostly vast amounts of absolutely nothing. But this is a game, after all, and right now space doesn’t feature anything more exciting than some rocks.
Of course, that’s to be expected of an alpha, and there are a boatload of huge features (including multiplayer and a survival mode) that are yet to come to the game. Is it worth your money right now? That depends on what you’re looking for. Personally, I’ve had a lot of fun building and destroying ships and space stations in Space Engineers. If that sounds like your thing, it might be a worthwhile purchase for you, too. But if you need a more traditional game, this is another early access offering you’re probably better off avoiding until it’s more complete.
Up next: Nether. If I can ever actually get it to let me log in….
Previous early access games:
Let’s play Rust: surviving the zombie apocalypse in a dead world
Rust is one of the recent entries in the "open world survival MMO with zombies and crafting" genre. It's a cool concept, but is it worth your money yet?
Let’s play Starforge Alpha: building your future on an alien planet
We take a look at the Starforge early access alpha. Is building a fortress to keep out the alien worms on a foreign planet as fun as it sounds?
The post Let’s play Space Engineers: build your dream spaceship and set sail for nowhere appeared first on Games in Asia.
The post Let’s play Space Engineers: build your dream spaceship and set sail for nowhere appeared first on Games in Asia.
