Opening Hours- Hardspace: Shipbreaker

I’m now going to talk a lot about the opening hours of the excellent, space toil simulator developed by Blackbird Interactive. Released initially through early access in 2020 it’s held its niche appeal throughout its ongoing development lifecycle on Steam, although there’re rumours of a console release in the future.  

Remember, these are my first impressions of an early access game that I’ve only played for 9 hours, so take it easy. Full story spoilers will be avoided.

Blackbird Interactive are a relatively new developer mostly known for a Minecraft AR title and the Homeworld series. Both of which I’ve never played so I won’t go on about them. However, their small library makes this title more impressive if anything.

 
The Options Menu: (Scroll down to Gameplay if you don’t want to read this… heathen)

Although the game runs at a steady 60 fps for me at 1440p on my ageing 1080ti, the options are somewhat lacking. Those that are here are standard fair: resolution, Fullscreen, readability features, Vsync, texture quality (Low, Medium, High) and dynamic lighting.

Some more customisation would be nice in future.

 

ALSO, FOV SLIDER- ALWAYS.

 

Audio options are standard fair too, it would be nice to have some variants of speaker setups, but volume dials will do for now.  

 

Fully customisable key bindings are available as well as gamepad functionality. Subtitles are present and they can all be read/heard in several languages.

 

Gameplay:

Hardspace is at its core a simulation puzzler. You take control of one particularly unfortunate redshirt as he toils, dies, toils and toils again. All in a grim future where people are forced to hand over their life to an unseen entity, hell-bent on enforcing conformity through sheer lack of other options, try imagining that in 2022.

 

You’re tasked with deconstructing various spaceships, of various sizes and lethality to pay off debt. You’ll use a laser cutter, an intuitive grapple, tethers, and various other gizmos to manipulate the valuable materials, equipment and power sources in the zero-gravity scrap yard. All equipment and tools can be upgraded for meaninglessly large sums of money, using the in-game currency you earn from your work. Upgrades vary from situational godsends to straight stat increases.  

The game’s very impressive engine and its various systems: simulated inertia, depressurization, fire, electric circuits and nuclear explosions combine to make for some particularly challenging 3D puzzles, and that’s before throwing fuel, oxygen and broken equipment into the mix.

 

The Aesthetics are somewhere between realism and cell-shaded, but they serve to make the environments easily readable, combined with the methodical layouts of the ships they make everything fit tightly into the world (or Space…).

 

Its major gameplay hook lies in the addictive nature of learning how to, most efficiently, clean out the complicated ship types, min-maxing in the most stone-cold manner possible… profit versus loss. You’ll lose time while satisfyingly deconstructing a freighter down to its frame.

Conclusion:

 

I’ve enjoyed my time with Hardspace: Shipbreaker so far. It’s a chilled-out game with some excellent music, solid gameplay, is easy on the eyes and has a little existential dread thrown in.

 

Its developers have been excellent and reliable in releasing new updates too, so it’ll be well supported and continue to grow, I’m sure.

I would recommend giving it a shot.