Recent reviews by Silas H. Tyler

This is one of my top five, for what that's worth. Let me start with the pros and cons.
Pros:
-The sheer scope of what you can build is mind-boggling. Your limitations are your computer's hardware and your ability to imagine unique solutions to what you might encounter. Need a faster way to get that ore vein out of the ground and into your refinery? Build a drilling rig. Pirates making life difficult? Turrets, patrolling drones, or jet/ space fighter... it's up to you. Have a fetish for needlessly complicated Rube-Goldberg machines? Boy, have I got a game for you!
-most of your locomotive parts require fine-tuning for the environment you're in, but ince you get your ship/ rover set up, the controls are easy, smooth, and intuitive.
-the online community is made up of real and would-be engineers. You'll find smarter people playing this game than some others, and it makes it easier to make friends and get along.
-planets are a monumental achievement in my opinion. Now that they've been introduced, there are a wealth of new challenges to overcome. my personal favorite thing to do on a new save is build a rocket from scratch and land on the moon.
-the game has an odd beauty to it. Space gameplay can make you feel incredibly introspective as you stare out into nothingness. Once you've landed on a planet it gets even better. You can land anywhere, face any direction, and hit the screenshot key. You'll get gorgeous wallpaper-worthy pictures every time.
-these days the game is quite stable. Since the creators have begun updating in two branches, the stable branch hardly has an issue for me. Back in the old days, it was hard to get anything done, I had to ctrl-alt-delete so often.
-if you're hungry for new toys in-game, there's a development update branch. A little more troublesome than the stable branch, but worth dealing with the bugs if you want to see the latest and greatest new features.
-the devs are very active in the community. Every bug report I've ever posted in forums has had a Space Engineers dev answer it.
-the soundtrack is excellent, and there are scores that fit every situation.
-the building mechanics are a lot of fun to me. It might seem tedious to put ore ine a machine to make metal stock, then put that into a machine to make parts, then to use a welder to put the parts together... but I find it a very pleasant, relaxing process.
-the workshop is full of excellent mods and player builds. Second only to Skyrim as far as quality AND quantity of mods.

Cons:
-it's early access. You probably already know that this game is buggy and inconsistent.
-you need a seriously beefy rig to run this game. A good video card is paramount, but the game's only playable with a 64bit OS and the processor to match. You better have a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of RAM, too. Don't subject yourself to trying only to meet the minimum requirements. Go with the recommended, at the very least.
-some bugs take forever to get fixed. In the early days, landing gear liked to violently explode when you locked onto a surface. It took two years to get that to stop.
-the game updates and changes on a fundamental level pretty often. If you have a mod you really like, expect it to stop working almost every week. Best case scenario, the creator of the mod will scramble to keep it up to date, so it'll be playable most of the time. Pretty often though, a modder will get sick of trying to keep up, and will give up on the mod altogether.

TL:DR - get it, and pay full price, you cheap bastard! If you like building and solving problems creatively, there is no better game than Space Engineers!

Sure, I recommend it.
Pros: It look pretty slick. I like the attention to detail in the environment. I like the rewinding mechanic, and the idea of your decisions carrying a little more weight in this game, compared to other games with a "good option/ bad option" system.

With that being said, I ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hate the characters in this game. I might be biased, becuase I got sick of hipster culture years ago, but every person I encountered in the first few minutes was an annoying ♥♥♥♥. "Hurr durr, old camera good, because old=good!"

I went to TV Tropes and Wikipedia to look ahead a bit and see if I wasn't being fair, but it looks to me like Chloe and Max are pretty much the same people throughout the entire experience. The game very clearly wants you to like Chloe, so you'll sympathize with her and feel compelled to preserve her life, but I just can't bring myself to like her. She's a whiny, mean-spirited, entitled little ♥♥♥♥ with a bad case of "that's someone else's fault." Spoiler alert: she does not get better, if the game's own fans are to be believed. I wanted to like this game, but I can't sympathize or identify with whiny high school kids. I couldn't in school, I certainly can't now.

As much as I dislike the cast and their apparent collective lack of an arc, I can see the work and care that went into this game. Even though my hatred of hipsters and the idea that high school is the dramatic be-all end-all prevented me from enjoying this game, I still recommend it for the unique mechanic and the style. Plus, episode 1 is free right now. Can't beat that.

Don't take my word for it, though. Try the game while the first chunk of it is free; maybe you'll like it better than I did.

I love the Cthulhu Mythos, and have heard that this particular game is the best there is, when it comes to Lovecraftian horror. However, I can't get past how frustrating the controls are. No sprinting, and a sneak button that seems to change nothing. The voice acting is cringe-worthy, and the NPC's in Innsmouth are all hideous. I get that they're probably supposed to be showing the "degeneracy" that Lovecraft so often described in his writings, but the humans in this game don't look particularly scary or monstrous, just slightly weird and offputting. Also, the game seems to play itself for a lot more than I would like. I get to control the protagonist for a whole ten feet before the game seizes control to make him look around or walk down a hallway.
I'm going to keep playing, because dammit I need my Lovecraftian horror. I've heard that the story is excellent, and I'm really looking forward to it. Let it be known that this game's controls are a giant pain in the ass, though. Get it on sale, definitely. Or just watch a Let's Play if you want the story without all the engine-induced difficulty.

We all know what happened when this game launched. I didn't play it for a good long while because of the early feedback. I still didn't play it after the patch. Finally I decided to just try it last week, and see if it deserved all the backlash. I actually really enjoyed this game. It wasn't quite as polished as AA or AC, but I personally never had any problems with freezes or crashes. Not even once! There were plenty of clipping issues, but they weren't so bad. Barely noticeable, even. The biggest realy problem I had was that events wouldn't trigger when they were supposed to, but if I saved and reloaded, the events always triggered the second time I tried.

PROS:
-Love, love, LOVE the playable cast. It is so cool to be able to play as the whole Batfamily. Everyone's moves are similar enough that swapping out isn't a terrible shock, but different enough that the characters don't all feel the same.
-Related to the above, I liked how Robin and Nightwing had a bit of a bigger role in this installment. The character switching mechanic was pretty cool, too. Especially during the Catwoman/Batman Riddler challenges.
-The Batmobile looked and sounded hella good. It was a ton of fun to drive around Gotham (at first.)
-John Noble was a boss as Scarecrow. I never liked Dr. Crane's voice in AA. I thought he should sound imposing and scary, and I think Denethor delivered.
-The Arkham Knight was an interesting anti-Batman, and I think the idea had a lot of potential.
-The thugs felt a lot more human this time around, and I actually felt tiny pangs of guilt whenever I punched their lights out. "I gotta hit a toy store. I promised my kid I'd bring him something."
-The huge variety of alternate costumes was a plus. Most of them function just as well as the vanilla ones, and the rest only had minor hiccups with the cape flapping weirdly.
-The Batmobiles all having their own distinct sounds and handling was really nice. My wife's been tearing it up with the Burton version all evening.
-Azrael is a favorite character of mine, and it was neat getting to play as him, brief as it was. I liked Batman kicking around the idea of allowing ol' Azrael to replace him.

CONS:
-The Batmobile wore out its welcome pretty quickly. I found myself using it only when forced to, especially after getting all the grapnel upgrades. I would much rather fly than drive.
-What was the deal with all the tanks? Seriously, I don't know if I could think of anything less Batman-like than having weird shootouts with robot tanks.
-As big of a first impression as the Knight made, I felt he kind of petered out at the end. I felt lied to, after being told that the Knight was an all-new character. As much as I love the Red Hood, making Jason Todd the Arkham Knight just felt weird.
-The DLC wasn't worth the money. Each "episode" only took me like fifteen minutes, and they all felt like dressed-up challenge maps.
-Nightwing's sticks never seemed to be in his hands. They just floated around his waist.
-The Riddler is an annoying prick and I got sick of him halfway through getting the trophies in the first game. I get that having him be the one behind the collectibles makes sense, but Jesus H. Christ, this version of the character gets on my nerves.
-I was hoping for a Dark Deco Batmobile skin, a la the animated series. That's not a huge gripe, it just would have been nice.
-Gotham was hard to navigate. Everything looked the same, and it took me forever to even begin to learn the layout of the city. I still have to Google certain landmarks.

TL,DR:
It's not as bad as everyone says. The hype was too strong for its own good. I rather enjoyed myself, but you should definitely wait and get this one on sale.