Recent reviews by Matt92099

With today's announcement that Take-Two has laid off the entirety of Intercept Games (confirmed per Bloomberg), I'll finally write my review, which is something I had held off doing until my last drop of hope evaporated. KSP2's development was not as controversial as many online would have you believe, especially compared to more scandalous ones, but for me it is by far the most disappointed I've ever been with a video game.

KSP2 was announced in August of 2019 at Gamescon, slated to release in 2020 by Star Theory Games, formerly known as Uber Entertainment. Wikipedia states:

"For various reasons, the release date was pushed back to Q3 2021."

This is a really funny sentence to me in 2024, knowing that the early access (EA) release would not be coming until a year and a half after that date. During this time, Take-Two established a new studio under Private Division called Intercept Games, poaching a dozen employees from Star Theory, including creative director Nate Simpson and lead producer Nate Robinson. The game would continue a long string of announced delays with little communication and progress updates in between, foreshadowing what was to come. Finally, in October of 2022, an early access release date of February 24, 2023 was announced. The date was, for once, one Intercept Games would stick to. Along with this announcement came a road map of major features for future updates, which outlined the following: early access, science, colonies, interstellar, exploration, and multiplayer, to be release chronologically over an unrevealed timeline. The hype that had died down over the years was [mostly] restored, and Intercept Games had bitten off more than they could chew.

Before I get into the release, I want backtrack a bit and have everyone watch the Cinematic Announcement Trailer that was released 4 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_nj6wW6Gsc&

Who is responsible for this? It is by far the best game trailer I've ever seen. It EMBODIES what players love about Kerbal Space Program: the mystique of other worlds, the scale of space, the clumsiness of Kerbals, and the drive we have to succeed after failure. The latter two quite literally embody the Kerbal way, as anyone from KSP1 who has stranded their loyal astronauts on Duna or straight up murdered them on the launchpad can confirm. If you were involved in any way with this trailer, give yourself a huge pat on the back. It may very well be the only good thing Intercept Games ever accomplished.

Two weeks before the early access release, ESA held a preview event where content creators could play the game for a few hours. Many of these content creators recording themselves playing and something seemed, well, off. You can see it in their eyes and the way they talk about the game. The very framework which would support every roadmap feature was not built on solid ground.

Two weeks later, early access was released. I recall some buzzing in the discord in the days before release about the frame rate, but Intercept has a history of being proactive with the ban hammer and anyone who commented these things was swiftly removed. Forced positivity was the subterfuge they needed to convince themselves that what was about to release was worth a fraction of the resources that had supposedly been poured into it. To cut a long story short, release day was a complete and utter disaster. Performance was abymsal with many high end systems topping out at 15fps, crafts were generally wonky and not in the "Kerbal" way, anti-aliasing looked jagged, maneuver nodes were busted (if you could even manage to get to space in the first place), no reentry heating, and an unlimited number of other failures all reared their ugly faces. Even the tutorials themselves didn't feel like KSP. Wrap all those mistakes into a $50 price tag and it's not hard to see why KSP2's player count dipped below KSP1 within days of launch. I'm not going to pretend like I stuck it out and spent my time troubleshooting and reporting bugs to make the game better. I did what any sensible person would do and asked Steam for a refund.

The period that followed went as you would aspect: poor damage control. Intercept gaslighted their fan base and ruled with an iron first on their forums and Discord server. Nate occasionally posted updates on their forums, filled with so much technical jargon it made reading them a bigger chore than booting up the game itself. Other than that, there was a lot of radio silence. I encourage everyone to give this website a whirl, which displays the scale of our solar system if the Moon was only 1 pixel:

https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

While you're scrolling, imagine each planet is an update given by Nate on the development of KSP2. The analogy works. Trust me.

In October of 2023, Nate gave a speech at Space Creator Day, in which he outlined some of KSP2's development problems before announcing the first roadmap update, For Science!, which ended up releasing in December of 2023. Performance had improved throughout 2023, and For Science! would give players objectives to work towards, but many of the release day issues remained unsolved, and many questions were still unanswered, like:

How could a planned release date of 2020 be delayed three years into a rushed EA release?
Why did you double down on Unity knowing the same limitations would still be there?
And ten thousand others you can scour the Internet for in your free time.

There is something really special about Kerbal Space Program. It feels unique, quirky, and most of the time, it just works. Games in this position are invaluable, and very hard to follow up with successful successors. Cities: Skylines 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon World are more recent examples of games that, by and large, failed to recapture any of what made their
predecessors unique. Even at its best, which it rarely ever was, KSP2 never felt like KSP1. Sid Meier once said his design philosophy for designing and creating his games is to "play them, over and over, until they are fun." It's clear that Meier's wisdom was never present in the development of KSP2, since it was never at any point any fun. Such is the early access fate, and shame on all of us for buying into it again. No lessons will be learned and will all be stewing in our anger in a few months at the next major letdown.

Kerbal Space Program 2 set its sights on the stars. Unfortunately, it sits abandoned at the launch site, having never even taken flight.

Take-Two ruins everything they get their hands on. F*** Take-Two.

$60 dollars later (got the super citizen edition) and can never play the f****** game, from black screens to a que to get into the game you paid for but cant play when you want to. Just spent 1.5 hours in line to load in. Really fun game crap servers. Shop items are on a timer (after 2 days the items refresh and you cant get the old ones) but the game wont let you buy stuff due to bugs or server being crap. Not worth trying to play right now. once fixed review will change.

amazing cant wait to see where it goes with updates

if it remotely interests you just do it

nice

Good

Very good game

This game is fun until you play it. Then it is fun again. Please play this game

nice

just giving review for the achievement. The game is okay honestly tho like not great not amazing but its a game

Big people little map - hate games like that To slow so progress none intutive mechanics bad game is bad