The short version: this game is a janky, broken mess that screams out for a quality-of-life pass. I deeply regret buying it, and a significant portion of my 16hrs of playtime were spent redoing things that broke, or just trying to figure out some very basic things. It's bad. Avoid. Longer version: I love Hardspace: Shipbreaker. I love games where you can salvage and build. The salvaging and building part of the game is... fine. It functions. You can right click on a thing, click "uninstall", and your character uninstalls it. You can right-click a thing, click on "repair" or "restore" and they do that. You need a variety of tools to do these things, and some of them need power. Cool. All of this is great. And then the wall of your (broken down) ship breaks due to wear and tear, and you need to repair it. Awesome! Some urgency! But... You can't repair the wall cause the cooler is in the way. Fine, fine, I'll just uninstall the cooler: done. Repair the wall? Easy. I'll just put the cool...

Really enjoying this game so far. I have to admit the first time I tried it, it was maybe a bit too daunting, and i was on steam deck. I didn't quite give it the time it deserved and it wasn't until I recently came back to it that I have seen how it shines. Its a big confusing complex world with many fiddly systems and things to learn, but you are given a level of freedom in space to do things your way that scratches all of my itches. Basic loop is roll into a character, make some choices and land with a weak body and a ship that you owe tonnes of money on. learn how to repair, breakdown, and build ships and venture out into deep space to find your target. Starting tips: definitely start with a gig from the gig nexus. there are a couple easy body identification ones available <not sure how random these are, only my most recent character did gigs, and had 2x gigs for murdered corpses on the same ship. netted me 50K not including salvaging their ship. but wait, if you want to salva...

It has its gameplay loop in place, but it's still pretty barebones. But hey, they made sure your Pronouns will update correctly if you change them midgame YAAAYYYYYYYY! I'm tired of seeing this crap instead of adding actual features to the game, and I'm sad my money is funding these agendas in any way.

Re-reading The Expanse novels made me want to jump back into this game....tenye fo du ere ereluf filters bosmang

So at the time of this writing I have 1527 hours into this game. This game is a cassette futurism themed look and feel (Think like 1979 Alien, knobs and buttons). It is set in space after a disaster renders Earths orbit impossible to safely travel, leaving the rest of the solar system cut off. Hyper capitalism controls everything, everything is trying to bleed you for every red cent. Your lucky enough to start with a junker of a ship.... That has a crushing mortgage that must be paid in installments every 6 hours. This game doesn't hold your hand, you have to figure everything out more or less on your own. There is a manual that explains basic ship functions, and reactor set ups, etc etc. READ IT. It's the only help you get. There is a tutorial that will lead you to your first derelict ship to salvage various equipment from, and possibly a salvage license... Oh did I forget to mention? The local station owns even the dead ships, you can salvage anything you want, but to do it legall...

The controls and interface are pretty hard to navigate, I don't mean the ship controls either (I actually like those) I mean the menus, why does the "jobs" menu take up half the screen when I need to click it and then things in front of me? why is it such a pain to use? why cant I make irregular shaped areas? why cant I edit an area after creation? etc it's also not really super clear whats going on, for instance my character had a sad face, 10 seconds later they're exhausted from being up for 72 hours (I don't think I've even been playing that long, the sleep bar was empty?) then they pass out and die from asphyxiation. I'm assuming there was an invisible leak in the ship - run ended. I don't mind if a game is hard or punishing, but I'd at least like to know what I did wrong and how I screwed up and whats actually going on. Also the start is rough, they've added a tutorial to try to guide you through it which is nice but the tutorial doesn't tell you that your starting tools are...

Fun but way too many bugs as of now, full of stuttering and other problems. Turning off ceiling mode and pressing alt turns it back on, you need to go back to menus to turn it off again. Zone designations barely work, sometimes drag clicking adds tiles to a zone, sometimes it does not, if a zone ends near a corner tile, there is a chance that your character will infinitely stack items on top of a wall tile. Path finding is abysmall, the characters always choose the shortest path even though it might take 3x longer. Some UI Elements seem to sometimes just flat out dissapear and not reappear until you reload the save. The character needs menu does not work as intended, it might be 10% full but the tooltip says that the character is very tired, same goes with food and thirst. Combat is very janky and unintuitive. Very tedious to change out and recharge tool batteries when you are expanding your ship, not only the building itself is time consuming, navigating the inventories of rechargers ...

terrible controls

Do you have autism? Do you like hyper-precise but unintuitive controls and instructions? Would you like a social communication tree as inscrutable as possible? Does this sound like a bad review? IT IS NOT.

Cool game with a lot of depth on the surface, but it's actually a simpleton in very good disguise. The framework they've built is great but otherwise the game lacks content and is shitty to play in the long term.