All right, cutter. Time to polish this spout shoe
Do you remember the opening cutscene for Starcraft? No, it wasn’t the scene where Gerard DuGalle watched a battlecruiser as a swarm of Zergs overran a colony. That’s what you get when Brood War installed. No, I mean someone that a group of spaceships salvaging wreckage and a team of Protoss shows up to clean the planet. Have you ever wanted to be one of the heads of space? No, I don’t mean being vaporized by space elves.
There’s something serene about the whole zero-gravity scene. Survey the ruins, celebrate the potential passage, and die in the hostile void of oblivion; that’s something that struck me in my younger days, and now Hardspace: Shipbreaker making it a reality. Eh… They’re turning it into an interactive experience.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker (computer)
Developer: Blackbird Interactive
Publisher: Focus Entertainment
Released: May 24, 2022
MSRP: $39.99
Work Sims has exploded in popularity recently. Although management games have been around for almost as long as video games, downfall and dirty work are a new logical phenomenon. There are arguments about “maybe only have a job do X” that accompanies these games, but I would rather bite the mud at the bottom of the trenches than pull up the blankets and live in them.
For that matter, it can be difficult to get particularly hot with job simulators. It has to be fun, and some of these games consider it quirky or fun. For that reason, the streamer crowd has gone after these, which allow them to exhibit some sort of amazingly poor behavior while still having fun.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker interesting because it’s not particularly weird, nor is it dull. It has a sense of humor about everything, but it doesn’t make fun of itself. Instead, it presents a satire about the modern workplace and our corporate overlords. Except that really works, so if you’ve ever had a really attractive boss and worked under the heels of an emotionless and unfamiliar manager, it’s probably going to be almost impossible. go home. Sorry, I’ve been in IT for nine years. It’s not the most tiring job, but Hardspace: Shipbreaker managed to find all the nerves my former supervisor used to poke.
All right, cutter. Time to peel this banana
That’s fine and everything, but it’s not necessarily the main attraction of Hardspace: Shipbreaker. From your first day on the job until you’ve decided you’re done, you hover in zero gravity, through the empty corridors and crawl spaces of various industrial ships, unfolding them. and peel them off.
The work is very simple. There are three types of scraps and each will be put into a different space bin. You have to figure out how to restore every part that you can and get it in place. This entails cutting, stripping and even exploding parts from the hull.
It starts easy; don’t startle yourself and be careful with the cutter around those big red crates. In the end, you work your way up to much more dangerous kits. There are thrusters where you need to cut off fuel while things start burning. There are reactors that you need to prep, drain and dump before it vaporizes you and a large part of the ship. Then there’s the explosive decompression, which can sometimes be an inconvenience and other times a catastrophic setback. Time is money, but scrap is also money, and it’s worth more in a puzzle.
All right, cutter. Time to shave this gorilla
The act of tearing apart a ship is satisfying. A clean shave is like space music. Watching your hairbands pull on their outer shells and put them in place is like taking a nap in a hammock. But then there are the tense moments, like when you find out that the atmospheric regulator in part of the ship has failed, so you need to do “controlled” decompression. Or when you pull up a reactor and realize that the path you created is not as clear as it used to be.
If that turns out to be the kernel, your master, Lynx Salvage, will have you covered. They will just launch a copy and get you back to work. That is probably the darkest little corner of Hardspace: Shipbreaker’s sense of humor. It at least made me care for my mortal shell so that death doesn’t plunge me into another existential crisis. Oops, it’s happening again, keep it up.
It’s in standard mode; death is not permanent. There is a limited play that gives you a limited amount of lives to spend. Then there’s a permanent death mode if you don’t want to laugh in the face of the space god. Finally, there’s a more liberal mode where you don’t have to worry about death or changing clocks. None of them are actually advertised as actual gameplay, but the whole cloning thing is put forward for narrative reasons.
All right, cutter. Time to crush this stripper’s pole
Hardspace: Shipbreaker It’s a pretty long game. There is a perpetual allure in deciphering spaceships, but there is a beginning and an end to the main career. Initially, you have a huge debt to Lynx, and that is given to you like a red herring for the main objective of the game. As you gain experience by achieving salvation and leveling objectives, additional objectives unlock and the story progresses to the end. All in all, a pretty satisfying progression, but it took a long time to get there. Fortunately, it is supported by a lot of different ship configurations.
I also have good news and bad news about the soundtrack. Bad news first: it’s mostly country. The good news is that it is not the modern mass nation. You won’t hear lyrics about beer, the ideal virtues of small-town living, and the life lessons you learn while driving a truck. You won’t hear any lyrics at all. See, the good news is it’s just an atmospheric country. Acoustic guitars, fiddles, and then you pull that reactor and the panic technique overlays it. As someone who hates modern country, the soundtrack doesn’t really bother me. However, my brain insists that there are only about three tracks for the whole thing and refuses to stop playing them for me.
One thing to keep in mind is that the story can be drawn quite clearly. A lot of times you stare at the wall to hear a character talking on the phone. You never actually see these characters. It does a good job of expressing working-class anxieties, but if you just want to go and cut the train sporadically, I might find it a bit frustrating. It never really bothered me. I find the characters quite likable
Hardspace: Shipbreaker succeeds in everything it tries. Not only is its gameplay extremely replayable and consistently satisfying, but it also manages it all on a very solid narrative foundation. Visibly, it feels like you have your head down while a force greater than you determines your fate. Total. But if you don’t want all the chatter of terrible management and resistance to consolidation dragging you down, you can go in and hack a few different ships. It’s a serene zero-g experience as a wasp flies around in your helmet. Ignore it, and maybe it will leave you alone. Except maybe not, wasps are sensationalists.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
