Recent reviews by tmo97

Horrible user-interface, tons of things locked behind DLC, community of hardballs.
Learning cliff that never stops. If you expect to make a simple car in this game, no.
Be prepared for math, nonsense, glitches, inconsistent logic. (Example: Rotating/copypasting in build mode)

It's the only game that'll allow you to build stuff with blocks and this many functions, from keypads to microphones and in-game cameras and jet engines, airtight spaces, but it's also the only game of its kind where torque isn't a thing, where it's a massive challenge to get a simple car to drive and steer, and where you're literally forced to learn circuitry because there is no other way. Tutorials are all outdated, all the time.

I repeatedly install this game only to try it for 5 hours straight only to bang my head on the same impossibilities (yes I'm going to call them that) only to realize some stupid thing that means I have to rebuild my whole thing painstakingly again and it kills my vibe. Digital gauges just showing nonsense and shifting decimals around (no I didn't rotate it wrong you condescending community dillholes), not having the mental RAM to formulate the 20+ logic sequences and formulas that I need JUST to get the engine to turn a WHEEL-

♥♥♥♥ this game, don't buy it, wait until tech-game devs can come up with something that doesn't pick between "Overtly dumb and featureless" and "Arbitrarily overcomplicated and ♥♥♥♥ you for a user interface."

Empyrion? Fun, lets you build stuff to go to space and lets you explore, but that's about it. That's where it stops trying. You've got oxygen and temperature, and that's about it. Airtightness is basically all there is in Empyrion. Space Engineers? Oh, they have logic gates and all that, which is, again, great, but it's full of bugs and the U.I. is laughable. Stationeers makes things vastly more complicated than they need to be, because it was made by that kind of person who likes rubbing their infected gums all day. On one hand it has lots of fun mechanics, but then it's made excessively complicated to the point where it's only ever played by finnicky engineering nerds who have zero intentions of having this game appeal to the public.

Stormworks? Well, they struck somewhere in the middle, leaning toward that Stationeers-side. On the one hand, they decided to 'make it realistic', but then they threw torque out the window, and you can go browse some threads and realise just how much inconsistent ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reasons the devs have for their game's design decisions.

Everything is made to be annoying and a challenge to work with.

You can't just plop down an engine, a fuel tank, "pipe" the engine power to the wheels, add a clutch, a gearbox, a driver seat, and have a drive, no, you have to wire it all up by hand, which lets you do a bunch of creative stuff, which is great, until you realize that there's only a handful of ways to actually get this thing to drive without flipping itself, breaking itself or just straight-up not doing anything whatsoever.

Clutch logic? I'm 78 hours in and I still don't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ get it, even after watching tons of videos and reading tutorials and asking around and it's all just arrogant ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ who jerk off to themselves in the mirror. I know what a clutch is, I know the physical principle, I know how that works, and I'm supposed to come up with this mathematical formula to determine when and how that clutch should engage, and then I need to make sure that the engine output-

In conclusion, it's a game full of those moments where you sigh your lungs out, roll your eyes up, eyelids start flickering, where you get to solve a bunch of tedious problems by fighting the user interface before you get something basic done.

People will ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ flock to this review to say "Noo look at my massive battleship with functioning everything so you're stupid" just to prove my point, and some other passive-aggressive ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ will come and say "It's just not for you"

I don't recommend, tech devs should make something APPEAL TO NORMAL PEOPLE FOR ONCE. STRIKE A ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ BALANCE

Here's my honest review on Space Engineers.



First of all, let me start by dismissing most of the reviews.
You can skip this part by scrolling until you see BOLD LETTERS.
There are people who say it's all good, there are people who say it's all bad.
There are people who say it's a fact, there are people who say it's a matter of opinion.

In my opinion, Space Engineers was a fun journey to discovering the mechanics were lacking and there was a massive void of content. The devs promised a lot of stuff that never came and there's no sign of it ever coming. People have valid complaints, and there are also people who have invalid complaints.

At the end of the day, whether they like it or not is on a spectrum. They both like and don't like the game. If you see someone say the game is total garbage, they're ignoring the parts they like. The same goes for someone who says the game is great. Someone who says it's just a matter of opinion while dismissing all complaints is trying to sugarcoat it. Someone who says it's just a matter of opinion while dismissing all justifications is trying to smother it.

It's 369 hours, and it's 'only' $16.99, but I enjoyed it in the same way I would enjoy a piece of paper a la Spongebob.
If I had 10 hours, people would be saying I hadn't given it a good try. People will say I've been looking at it all wrong when I say I have >1200 hours on another account. A bad artist blames his tools, and I enjoy myself with what I have, and this game has some things that other games don't. Yet, I do not want to recommend it, mostly because I had to put in some real work to enjoy myself with this one, and eventually I decided "it was not for me", as some like to say. Most likely because they use the convenience of denying that there is a way to measure tangible value. Either way, here is what I think

WHAT I ACTUALLY THINK OF THIS GAME:

If you ask me, I find Space Engineers doesn't hit the spot for me. Lots of weird glitchy mechanics that have clunky user interfaces, the performance is okay. You can't make modlists, and you have to manually reselect all your mods when you start a new game. Once you make a drill and you have your oxygen supply setup, you're basically done with progression, and from that point on it is a barebones sandbox game. Building ships and walking around on them while they're flying sure is fun and that's not an experience any other game can offer as of time of writing.

Savegames get so massive that loading a save on an SSD can take up to 13 minutes, especially with mods, and I'm here sitting with my RTX3060, 12core 3.6GHz CPU, 32GB of RAM. If you play procedurally generated maps, you will run into that. If you like building fighter jets and doing dogfights, there is a community for that, and there are multiplayer servers. There used to be a lot of desync, that's mostly been fixed. I've been playing this and following this since it was a voxel tech demo asteroid miner game.

I very rarely retry Space Engineers, downloading this massive game only to get bogged down by trying to do something more than just grind my way through survival (see: AI blocks and drones) and then there are very few tutorials that are up to date. I've since given up on this game, and I keep track of updates to see if there's any major changes. There haven't been any major changes for years, they're also working on Space Engineers 2 and a bunch of other games, and this one seems to just be a testing ground for some AI-obsessed developer that likes to fiddle around with very technical stuff for that niche part of the community that is diehard fans of this game. Most advanced ships use glitches, so that should tell you something about the balancing.

The NPC enemies in this game are spiders and wolves, and they're so bad from a technological standpoint that you would see better AI in Half-Life 1. Yes, it's a voxel game, no, that's not a good reason. They have terrible pathfinding, their animations are extremely poor. There are NPC ships, which will attack your base and your ship. There's also cargo ships flying around for you to attack, which sure is fun. Disabling them and crashing into a planet and then rebuilding the wreckage into a functioning ship is one experience no other game has been able to offer.

That's my favorite part of this game, aside from just building what is essentially a flying space hotel. There's really no other game that lets you build some flying contraption that you can then walk on while it's coasting through space, with physics. Ships colliding with eachother gives you crumpled voxels and all that. It's clunky, and it's worse than you'd expect, but it's still something no other game offers, and it's something to at least go on YouTube and look it up. The speed limit is 100m/s, and there are mods that can improve this, but you'll be clipping through things, or your ship will just delete itself and leave behind maybe a thing or two when it hits something. You need a relatively beefy computer to run this game. It does not perform well, but it performs better than Empyrion: Galactic Survival. Space Engineers is less arcade-y than Empyrion, and has worse AI enemies, but I would say Empyrion is more beautiful. In Space Engineers, the weather system is simplistic, the temperature is just "hot/cold/warm/freezing" and it slowly depletes your health. No neat effects, just a barebones system that you would come up with for some school project.

Most of my time in this game was spent building stuff that I liked to imagine having a purpose, grappling the 'survival' aspect of the game and wishing for something that just isn't there. Because of that, I don't recommend it.

I recommend you wait for this to go on sale, and then play it with your nerd friends who already like Minecraft and space-related games. That would be your best bet, according to my experience.

This was my review on Space Engineers. I have 369.1 hours on this account.

Not worth $60. Campaign is a breeze, generic storyline gives the sensation that there's more to it, and then it's over. It's got the same storyline as a kids' cartoon about robbers, literally. Online gameplay is limited, people mostly play those ultra-tiny maps where they lie down in the one spot that has a pixel-perfect angle on every spawn and then instakill you as soon as you spawn. The bigger maps are empty, the matches are extremely short. Play MW2 or something, the campaign is better, the gameplay is better, the performance is better, there are more people playing it. Cashgrab to say the least.

This is my review as of 10th January 2024. The following has been my experience.

It feels tedious. I keep starting it up thinking I'm gonna survive and build and make some ships to explore the universe with this, but at every step, it's just tedious.

Want to build a hut? Okay, grab your survival multitool, set it to resource mode, now what? Find four different types of rocks. Iron, copper, silicon and stone. Hold M1 on them. Takes about 6 seconds each. Step on your hoverbike, drive to the next rocks. Okay, all good, just basic gathering mechanics, not exactly fun, but sigh.

Gather those materials, oh! You don't have a portable constructor. Make that thing in your menu. You can't, because you need to unlock it. Press F3, scroll down to the portable constructor, unlock it. Make the constructor from the crafting menu. Place it down on the ground. Now, move each and every thing that you gathered into the portable constructor.
You got some concrete blocks, you can't build anything. What?! Why?!

Oh, you need a 'Starter' block. Ohh, okay, so it's got this thing that makes the code easier to work with, okay, well, whatever. Probably some stupid reason for it. Place the block down, now you can build. Wait, there's now this ugly block that's crucial to my base, and it's on the ground. How do I move it? You can't. You need to destroy it, which you can't do without bullets, because just picking it up the way you placed it, impossible. Weird? sigh stupid design reasons, probably. Go build a gun and some ammo, shoot the thing and replace it. Oh, a core is expensive. You need more materials. Are you having fun yet? You don't even have a floor!

The whole game is like that. It's chores upon chores with no actual reason to it, it's a design choice revolving around filler to give you the idea that you're actually building and crafting and solving problems, but when you've done this 5 times, you start to get done with it.

Okay, so just play creative, right? Okay, let's start in creative mode. Okay, cool, I got a ship, I don't need to gather a bunch of stuff, ugh, and I can just fly wherever. Cool. Let's fly. Oh, the planet's got a couple of cool things, there's a crashed ship here, there's even a half-broken down vehicle that can still fly. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ neat, that's awesome. Let me just fix that up, seems like something that would happen in a sci-fi movie. Cool. Proceed to spend the next 10 minutes sorting items in your toolbar. Build your ship the way you want it, 30 minutes later, you've got something, and you're flying. sigh alright let's get going already, I need to see some fun stuff.

That's a radioactive planet, wow. Oh, it's only got three biomes. Foggy lava, desert and mountains. There's a thing walking around there that looks like it was ripped straight from a generic sci-fi shooter, there's no lore on what that thing is. It doesn't seem to care that you exist until you touch the ground. Okay, well, that's boring, that sucks. Wish they would've done something with that.

Look up threads, nope, nothing, just people complaining about it and people invalidating that complaining by saying stuff like "The game isn't boring, you're boring for not having fun with it." even though there's a reason they chose to play a game instead of imagining their dreams. Okay, that's depressing, that's not showing any hope for change. Guess I'll work with what I have. Explore more planets. Okay, icy moons, neat. Seems empty, though. There's a trading outpost, let's check that out. NPCs walking back and forth, spouting neat little lore lines. Okay, what else is there? A shop and some quests. Let's check out those quests. Oh, it's "Go there, kill that and come back with no effect on anything at all, for some resources or money." Okay, well, no.

Fly to different planets, there's an alien planet. It has the exact same plants as all the other planets. Wow, a gas giant! I can't fly there, why? Read threads, unimaginative explanations as to why there's not even a city in the clouds and a death zone below. sigh. Okay, discover more moons, check out some hot planets. They're also equally empty. Damn, is this all there is? YES! THIS IS ALL THERE IS! THERE WON'T BE ANY MORE THAN THIS!

Check out Reforged Eden. There's more content, but it's also geared towards all the players who ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love grinding. You can now make even less concrete with the stone you spent 20 minutes grinding. "Happy days, you should've learned the one meta way to do everything, because otherwise you suck." Thanks Reddit. Explore some stuff. Wow. There's way more planet types, there's more things to find. Well, I can't go back to the vanilla game now.

Guess I'll never touch survival mode again, not until I either muster up the massive patience I need to grind my way to getting to the point where things become cool, or I figure out a way to transform my mind into building a scenario for myself where I start with some cheated resources, and then learn how to enjoy the struggle that is building and maintaining things in this game.

There's just something wrong with how games are done. Everything feels like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ chore in all the techy games. It's like... nerds got bullied into getting a job so hard that they worked that into their games, any other way I put it is just far less probable than that. Stationeers, Space Engineers. All of these techy games have this void of content. No Man's Sky is a grindfest with empty content as well. The only content is grindy, doable in only very specific ways, and the fanbase is aaaalllwayssss going to invalidate your discontent.

As for the stigma:

There's some specific stigma with this game because it's got performance problems and hasn't changed much since 2016. Content changes a little bit, but not much, and while the playerbase knows it, most of them will find some way to stab your liver over popping their denial bubble. Multiplayer is ♥♥♥♥, no use sugarcoating it. It's glitchy, it's laggy.
There are a lot of inconvenient things that other games do better. For example, idle power consumption. Stuff like a 'food processor' (glorified hotplate) eats power even when you're not using it. So, you can turn things off, right? Well, you need to go into the menu and find each and every object that you want to turn off. There's signal logic for that! So what does that have you do: Spend 20 minutes hotwiring your base just so that it won't draw a bunch of power for no reason. All because of that design decision. siiiiighhhhhhhahhhhh...

In Space Engineers, you can wire your ship guns up to your toolbar. You can't do that in this game, and they refuse to add it. There's zero reason not to add it. Zero. Zero. Zero. ZERO!

Despite all that, Empyrion's the best I've got right now, and it's either this, or imagine stuff. I'd take this over Space Engineers, Stationeers. If you've ever played Starmade and thought "This is ♥♥♥♥, but it could be good" then get this game.
If you don't mind the grind, get this game and immediately download Reforged Eden, a massive mod without which the game is barren. Imo it really is a pretty game, but expect your PC to be a space heater.

Better Sims for less boring people.

Concept expression art. Peer pressure.
Can be completed in half an hour.
I never buy these games. This was the price of two sandwiches.
It looks quirky, but there is something to it.
The following is what kept me going.

! !! S P O I L E R A L E R T !! !

Many kids follow whoever is going.
Kids keep going until something changes their mind.
When kids are doing nothing, none of them do anything until everyone agrees.
When everyone agrees, either they all go, or someone disagrees.
When everyone chooses someone, that someone agrees.
A new kid doesn't belong. Where that kid goes is where everyone will go.

Free DLC is a decoy used to hide total absence of content updates.

also, free shotgun

just awesome