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Hardspace: Shipbreaker

I love the ideas that come out of indie game studios. This one is about being a shipbreaker; someone who disassembles old space ships. If you've paid attention to the players who've had this throughout EA you'll see a lot of divided opinions on what made it into the game & what didn't - but I respect the fact that this studio set out to do something very specific, and they did it. Yeah, there could be more ships - but they decided they wanted to make a really solid game about shipbreaking and tell a story about worker rights - and they did that amazingly well. I absolutely recommend playing this - I've spent almost 50 hours in this and absolutely loved it.

Notes

I bought this pretty early on in Early Access and refunded it as it simply wasn't functional (keybindings didn't work, graphics were fuzzy, couldn't re-start the game without changing files in Windows etc). I'm really glad I came back to it close to release - what a huge transformation from the early days to the finished product they have now. It's had a ton of work done on it, and the end result is a really solid zero-gravity game about shipbreaking. I think it's a shame that only 5.6% of players have finished the game (according to global Steam statistics).

Pros

  • Immersive atmosphere
  • Graphics are excellent
  • There are several different tools to manipulate different things on the ship
  • There are a good number of ship designs, but the do get stale over the course of the game
  • There are elements like fire, electricity and radiation that can set off chain reactions
  • The tether system works really well, and is a good way of moving large objects around
  • Really good controls. Maneuvering around in zero gravity feels great
  • The voice acting in career mode is really good - especially the closing cinematic
  • Great background music (there's also a great "Hardspace: Shipbreaker - Cutter Radio" playlist on Spotify)
  • There's a scanner that lets you see through walls, with multiple scan modes for finding things like devices, spare parts and seeing whether an area is pressurised
  • Ships are made of different materials, which need depositing into different areas around the ship. There's a furnace for materials that need melting down, a processor for high value materials, and the barge underneath for things like furniture, lights, items, consoles etc. It's really clear which items go where
  • There are a ton of upgrades to buy, which over time make shipbreaking much faster and easier
  • Different hazards make each ship interesting to deconstruct. These can include fuel pipes that ignite, thrusters you need to disconnect correctly, reactors you have to remove within a certain time frame or they blow up, and pressurised areas of the ship that you have to depressurise carefully or risk exploding the ship

Cons

  • There's no way to change the graphics options before the game starts
  • Each shift is only 15 minutes long. This is a hot topic on the boards. The game tells you you're charged about 600k every "day", but you only work for 15 minutes a day. There doesn't seem to be any actual game play reason to have this as a mechanic, so I think it's likely more a technical limitation because they couldn't think of a way to repair your gear during a ship
  • It's very unclear how to safely depressurise a ship. After doing some more reading, I discovered that most of the time it's physically impossible to safely depressurise a ship. That's a big downside for perfectionists who want to do it without damaging everything, and something you'd expect them to pay more attention to in a game like this
  • There are 30 ranks (levels) you can unlock, but there are zero new ships after rank 17. Zero new upgrades after rank 20, which feels really weird. I finished the game at about Rank 21.
  • After the first couple of upgrades, it's mostly just "5% better X", which is pretty uninspired
  • It's sometimes impossible to deconstruct a ship 100% correctly because some parts that go in different processing areas are welded together. Same as above on depressurizing.
  • The game could easily have involved more tools. There are only 3 (something to move things around, a cutter, and explosives). I would have liked to have seen more mechanics. Some ideas:
    • A wiring kit to safely disarm dangerous electrical equipment
    • More than 2 kinds of reactors
    • More interaction between ship mechanics so you have to do things in a certain order
    • Delayed tethers, so that you can blow something up and THEN pull everything in at once, rather than doing them one by one
  • There's a lot of interesting story in the game about workers rights, but most of it is simply played at you over audio while you're forced to sit in your HAB not moving, which is really dull. They really should be playing all of it over actually playing so people have something to do during the several minutes of people just talking at you
  • The game only saves after you finish a shift... which is usually when the 5 minutes of unskippable dialogue are played at you. So if you want to quit the game and it makes you sit through a load of dialogue, you have to sit through it again the next time you play
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