You take a deep breath as you aim your cutter and carefully slice two support columns to free up an outer panel of the ship you’ve been methodically stripping clean. Your goal is the reactor and you’ve nearly got it in sight as you slowly create a clear path for it to drop into the salvage zone below. In a flash, you’re suddenly sucked through a newly opened hole and sent careering out into space because a potato chip bag you didn’t notice caught on fire floated by the fuel line and set it ablaze. As you tumble into the void you catch a massive explosion taking place, knowing full well that was the reactor that just went into meltdown. You take another deep breath as you see the destruction added to your debt and start working on your next ship.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker
Developer: Blackbird Interactive
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC code for review
That’s the sort of vibe you can expect when playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the latest game from Blackbird Interactive, most known for creating the Homeworld and Dawn of War franchises. In it, you play as a Shipbreaker, someone whose job it is to take these massive ships and scrap them for parts. Thankfully it’s easy to become one, all you do is apply and you’re immediately flown out to your own station and lent all the tools you’ll need. There’s just the measly billion-dollar debt the LYNX corporation slaps onto you but don’t worry, you can work that debt off.
Equipped with a Dead Space style cutter and a grappling gun, you’ll get to work picking each ship clean of valuable material. You’ll do this by first selecting which of the randomly generated ships you want to work on. The current build of the game has about a half dozen ship types to play with, but what’s inside those ships can change. As you start your cursory inspection of each ship you load up, the immediate thought of “How in the HELL am I going to do this” always manifests itself. Each ship has this great slow escalation to it as you start with a fairly empty vessel that you quickly learn how to easily dismantle, and progresses to denser ships that require you to delve deep into its insides to learn how to take it apart. While definitely having a bit of a “chill shipyard junker” vibe to it, the game is more of a puzzle as you poke around each ship seeing what structural pieces connect to what and which parts you need to cut first to work your way to the truly valuable stuff inside the ship.
You aren’t just scrapping things willy-nilly however, as some parts need to be sent into the barge, processor, or furnace with each color-coded green, blue, red respectively. The separation keeps things easy to track with what goes where and turns what easily could have been a “just trash everything” sort of game into something with an added layer of depth. You also can’t take your time as you only have fifteen minutes before your shift is up to make as much progress as possible while also be cognizant of your oxygen and fuel supplies. Considering you’re (forcibly) having to rent out all your gear, after each shift you’ll see a breakdown of how much all your rentals take out of the profit you made salvaging. This layer incentives you to maximize each session to make sure you’re in the green at the end, otherwise, you’ll never make any dent at lowering your total debt. Once that’s all said and done you’ll head back to your living quarters where you’ll see a report of your salvaging job for the day and you can choose to upgrade your equipment or listen to any newly found audio files before jumping back into the shipyard to work some more. The upgrades, while basic things like increasing the range of the cutter, feel significant. Being able to last just a little bit longer without needing to rush back to refill on oxygen is massive and each time you’re able to upgrade something it feels like a worthwhile investment because you can see the effects of it immediately.
Sessions can be quietly intense and relaxing all at the same time and the short timer is honestly something I really love. It puts a hard timer on how long you can be in a session which makes it great for picking up and playing. In my time playing, I’d regularly check the time and knock out a quick fifteen-minute session before heading off to work. When it feels like almost every game coming out requires this massive time sink, it’s nice to play something that has longevity, but can be enjoyed in short micro-bursts.
Also included is a sandbox mode that lets you immediately jump into a timer-free session with any ship you want and a fully upgraded character. It’s a fun little extra mode for when I want to take the time to play around with various strategies of tackling a ship while not being constrained by a timer or worry about debt racking up. Leaderboards and daily challenges are soon to be added along with the ability for players to create their own ships with mod support. The sci-fi nerd in me is giddy at the thought of my favorite sci-fi ships to be recreated in this game and seeing them explode because I was too hasty and clipped a fuel line.
Being in early access means that there are some kinks that obviously need to be ironed out before its eventual release. The physics on smaller objects can get a bit funky at times, with the item sometimes spazzing out and flying off in a random direction when you grab onto it, sending your character spinning with it. In regards to game mechanics themselves, the game could use a better tutorial. Lots of UI elements aren’t explained at all and had to refer to the reviewer’s guide I was given to explain some, but not all of it. When selecting a new ship for example, each ship has a certain amount of days for… something? I at first thought it was the deadline I had to complete the ship but I’ve worked on many single day ships well past that initial day. There also isn’t an option to rebind the keys which is probably the first time I’ve ever experienced that with a PC game. Most of the static key placements aren’t ideal and being able to customize my controls would be incredibly helpful. For example, you’re able to grip things with your left or right hand which is super useful when you need to quickly grab hold of something if an explosion knocks you back. Problem is, the buttons for them are in such an awkward spot I practically never used them.
My time with Hardspace: Shipbreaker left me very excited for its future potential and is easily one of the most exciting games I’ve played in years.
