Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, space-based gathering, crafting, and dying in Space Engineers’ new survival mode.>
There’s a large red and white spaceship, its front end crumpled after what must have been a spectacular nosedive. There’s a tiny yellow space engineer inspecting the wreck, armed with only a handful of tools. There’s the inky blackness of outer space, the comforting glow of a distant sun, and an asteroid field of stationary rocks, chock-full of ore and minerals to mine. As the astronaut floats there, enchanted by the view, he notices a few of the asteroids — quite a few, in fact — have given up waiting for him to visit them and taken a more proactive stance. They’re delivering themselves to him. Well, at> him, anyway. In an awful hurry.
I have seen things in Space Engineers, readers. Horrible, crotch-related things. I got so wrapped up in seeing those things that I didn’t actually notice if there was any sort of game in there. Now I’m fine with pure building and messing about being considered gaming, but if you absolutely insist on there being some drama then the newly released Survival mode might be for you. There are a number of toggles that you can set, as well as plenty of starting scenarios to launch from, but the basic gist is everything needs energy, and if you don’t have enough of it you’ll die. Better get engineering. … [visit site to read more]
I wanted to know what state Space Engineers was in, because it’s been a few months since I last tried it out and it was already pretty impressive back then. How much could a game about building space ships and flying them change in a few months?
Well, on my first playthrough I was slinging ships across the void, watching as they met and crumpled and cooing at the damage model and simple building tools. Since then they’ve added multiplayer and Steam Workshop support, which was how I ended I ended up flying a spaceship the form of a shark into the crotch of a monolithic Homer Simpson. I apologise in advance. … [visit site to read more]