Early-access spaceship slicing simulator Hardspace: Shipbreaker has fired another update into orbit. This time around you’ll have yet another class of giant abandoned ship to crawl around in. To make matters both better and worse, you’ve got the new demotion charge tool to do it with. They’re nifty remote precision charges but apparently disarming them if you change your mind can be a trick. The new Business Is Booming update is out now for all you pro shipbreakers.

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Boarding and ripping open space ships as a contract shipbreaker was tough enough already. Hardspace: Shipbreaker has made its salvage simulation even more difficult with the new Haunted Frontier update that adds unmanned ghost ships to the game. if you’re successful, congrats, Hardspace is getting stickers as rewards that you can slap on your tools. Good freelancer, don’t complain. The update is out now along with other improvements and bug fixes to the early access game.

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Having already laid out a crushing capitalist future where debt is insurmountable and bodies are expendable, Hardspace: Shipbreaker now plans to pit its disposable workers against each other. Weekly challenges have arrived, delivering a new ship each week for gig-work scavengers to tear apart as efficiently as possible – proving once and for all who, exactly, is the best orbital vulture around.

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Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about cutting up spaceships with heavy industrial tools for cash. It’s a thrill to drift in zero-G, slicing and chopping and severing hull panels, superstructures, cockpits, airlocks, partly because the way you take them apart is up to you. You know what you have to do as soon as you get into space; you just need to figure out how.

That was also the experience of developer Blackbird Interactive as it began to develop Shipbreaker and brought it to Early Access. The theme quickly crystallised, but figuring out how freeform cutting would actually work was a lot harder, setting stern technical challenges that were never really solved, posing questions about player freedom that resulted in surprising answers, and causing spaceship designers’ nightmares.

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Halloo, gentle reader. Since we’re half way through the entire year of 2020 (yet somehow it is also still March?), we decided to run down, lasso and tie up some of our favourite games from the last six months, and force them into a nice list for you.

2020 still has plenty of new PC games to come, of course, but these are the ones closest to our little hearts so far. We’ve got strategy, we’ve got card games, we’ve got systematic reclamation of scraped spaceships. And, since Nate Crowley is one of the contributors to this list, we’ve got fish. Statistically speaking, there’s bound to be at least one game on here that you’ll ruddy bloody love too!

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Superb spaceship slicing sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker has added a new difficulty option to career mode, with shift timers disabled.

The existing career mode cuts you off and forces you back to base every 15 minutes, making things too stressful and intrusive for some. You can now take all the time you want with a wreck instead. They’ve also made the puzzling decision to give you an infinite oxygen supply for this mode. This is all additive, so players who like the thrill of yanking out a nuclear reactor and blasting it to safety in the dying ten seconds of a shift can still blow themselves up on company time.

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There are many reasons you should be playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It is full of so many details that my idle thought of “I wonder if I could write five things about it” became a list of a dozen within ten minutes.

The basic idea is that you fly around disused spaceships and gradually cut them apart for scrap and salvage, in a full 3D simulation complete with deadly hazards, time and money pressure, and a soothing space banjo soundtrack. It is lovely. And after playing it regularly for over a week, I’ve found some less obvious reasons why it has made a home in my heart. It’s the details, mostly. But what details.

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VINDICATION. That’s what Hardspace: Shipbreaker says to me. I have hinted several times that salvage is grossly under-represented in games. And now here’s a game all about it, and it as excellent as I’d hoped.

Despite being an estimate year from release, Hardspace Colon Shipbreaker already gets a lot of things right. But my favourite thing about it is one I didn’t even expect to feel so good: peeling the armour off a ship.

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Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about peeling open spaceships like they’re massive tin cans to reveal the abandoned detritus inside. The belongings of long departed crews hang in the darkness like deep sea fish. Cola bottles and crisp packets wander past your visor, disturbed into aimless tumbles by the change in air pressure when you popped open the airlock like a champagne cork. The only sounds are the distant thunks of the settling hull, your own breathing, and a folksy tune on steel guitar piped into your suit by your employer to improve productivity.

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Without good, honest workers stripping apart old spaceships, the galaxy would be much more crowded. The reason you never see Luke Skywalker run into traffic is because of the hard work done by the great tradesmen of the Milky Way. If you’ve always been more interested in carefully dismantling spaceships rather than flying them, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is definitely something you should check out.

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