Steam Early Access: Space Engineers Impressions

As the list of early access games on Steam grows ever larger, more and more gems come out of the woodwork, making you wonder why you ever need to buy a finished game again. And here I introduce to you one of the finest early access games on offer in the marketplace today: Space Engineers!!

Space Engineers is a sandbox space sim inspired by LEGO, which fully utilises a destructible environments along with building, dissembling, repairing, surviving, mining... the list goes on, and that's only part of what makes Space Engineers such a joy to play. If you've ever wanted to build your dream 100 engine spaceship, or a sun blocking monolithic space station, then go ahead, provided your rig can handle it! As the updates rack up, I think they're on about one a week, we see more and more of what this game has to offer, with vital inclusions such as multi-player, a health and death system, meteor showers and random encounters with currently unmanned ships being some of the most recent and important updates as of yet. There's still a heck of a lot of potential in this game which remains to be sapped by the developers 'Keen Software House', but I'd say that they've done a great job so far.

Much like other games of this sort, one centred on construction and realism, there is no set aim, but in nearly every server that I have joined, the player have managed to create aims, and assign jobs to each other to complete the, for example I'e come across people creating industrial powerhouses, perpetually churning out more resources than you could ever use, and for what? To create a better ship? To upgrade your mining gear? No matter what it is undeniable that at this early stage you do fall into the circle of mine, create better mining gear, mine, refine gear, mine, refine gear, and so on, but the fact that the core mechanics of the game, the mining and the creating and assembling is so good that it keeps people playing for so long, wanting to play more is certainly a feat. I found myself happily content with my mining ship, then suddenly discover some cool new tool I can attach, like ore detectors or beacons to navigate with, then spend the next couple of hours gleefully finding the resources to be able to make it, rinse and repeat, and at this early stage of development I have no issues with this, I'm just excited to see what can be added next!

It's vitally important to mention the Steam workshop when it comes to games like these. The community really have created some utterly fantastic things here from this:

To this:

The sheer amount of cool stuff available to make is mind boggling, and a great challenge in survival mode, as the amount of mining you're going to need to do to create something like what you see above is pretty crazy! Overall, Space Engineers is an incredibly ambitious game which the developers have started fantastically, and kept fresh through regular updates and the integration with the steam workshop, I can't wait to see what they can come up with next! Let me leave you with this lovely creation!