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.

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.