Space Engineers 2

TLDR: SE2 is a good start to what will probably be a really good game. It probably deserves a thumbs up as this is mostly a tech demo and it's pretty good for that, though they call it EA and charge us for the experience to debug their game. Just can't thumbs it up at this point for that. This is where my gripe starts. They don't listen to anything on Steam, and expect everyone who pays for the game to go to their site, make an account and submit proper forms and supporting data for anything. Bah, no use for it. If they gave the game to me for free as part of an alpha or beta testing program, sure, I'd be happy to. But this doesn't even qualify as alpha and they're charging for it and expect to treat us like we're their employees. No thanks... though I've already bought it and as I said, I think this will be a good game eventually and then maybe I'll redo my review to be more supportive. Steam is where they sell it, Steam is where I bought it, and Steam is where I would expect to report issues. Just about every EA I've been involved in has developers who participate on the Steam forums, though a few don't. But they get a negative review instead. It also tells me they'd rather hide behind broken processes than actually try to fix things. I'll skip bugs and such as this is an early release, and there are a lot of those, but lets add some good points. First, the game looks great, a big improvement over SE1, and for an early release, ran pretty good on my fairly low end system. The models are more interesting and they've added some basic automation to the tools and devices to make building easier and a bit less demanding. They dumped the confusing two grid system of SE1 and now everything is unified in one complete system. That is a very welcome upgrade. Flying is challenging to avoid crashing when landing on a planet and that feels right. Especially with the hobbled together spaceships we usually end up with. Get going a little too fast and you'll find out you really are flying a bomb. I'm looking forward to having land vehicles, but some of the terrain looks pretty demanding, so flying may always be the better choice. They have done a pretty good job at making things realistic and over time, as they expand the solar system, it should be really fun to explore. They've also been working on a better questing system as well, and SE2 has a good start on that and it's being imported back into SE1 to make that a better game. The tutorial is a bit jumpy though, going very quickly from one small place to another where I'd prefer a more larger base to expand and build upon, but it works and gives you a few flying vehicles to crash and learn on. One negative on it is that it would be nice if we could build and expand on the tutorial mission grids, but I wasn't able to other than what was identified as the starter grid. Can build your own though next to them. But some more negatives, and I'll state up front some of this is my own personal preference and since they supposedly do read reviews, I'll just dump some stuff here. There are design choices that just don't really make sense to me, like toolbars. Toolbars are used for both using items and building items. When and how you add stuff to it is a bit confusing. Building is pretty straight forward, but when you start mixing it in with persistent items like drills and other tools, it gets confusing what you're putting on the toolbar. Nothing is really explained either and the tutorial goes into more about the world just telling you to do stuff, rather than telling you how to do it in the game. For most of the introductory missions, you're just fixing stuff with resources you collect, but it gets more telling when they just dump you into a combat situation without any explanation of how to use the weapons you can now build. Experienced SE people can handle it, newbs not so much, or even those of us who haven't played in a while. The tutorial missions are also very simple and hand holding. Every place you go has all the ores you need within a short distance, usually a cave right next to the outpost. Even when I was exploring the planet looking for ore I noticed how dense things were. Ore was everywhere (though not every kind), and that seemed a big difference from SE1 where ore was much more spread out. EDIT: Figured out that this is probably because we can no longer process stone for some basic resources like we could in SE1, so they needed to add a ton more. Not sure which way is better, but I get tired of these huge ore icons all over the screen when you're in range of stuff. Hope they allow GUI scaling or the ability to turn icons on and off by type. EDIT: Another design decision that annoys the heck out of me is the autosave feature. It overwrites the currently loaded game save and I've often ended up in situations where things go bad and I am stuck with a terrible save because autosave messed it up. It should use it's own save game names and leave the saves we create alone. Even the quicksave just overwrites your existing file. It's not rocket science to use different names, and this goes back to SE1, so just a case where they don't care or ever learn. This is the only game I've ever seen do this and it's just lazy, bad design. And as I said above, the terrain generator for the planets is pretty unforgiving and driving is going to be a challenge. And if you get seasick, don't try to walk on an asteroid. It keeps you straight up to the ground all the time, which means your view is going all over the place as you hit every bump and crack in the surface. They did make flying very hydrogen efficient this time, though, and you can just fly everywhere, but that may just be for EA as in SE1 hydrogen got used up pretty quickly. The map is also pretty much useless at this point, but I'll give that over to EA and hope it gets better and more usable. I'll leave it with a prayer and wish for the dev team's success. I'll keep updating this review as the game progresses and I'm pretty confident it will eventually get a thumbs up, but for now, probably best to avoid.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE REVIEWS ABOUT PEFORMANCE. they are people who do NOT know how to change there graphics settings, the game runs great on my mediocre setup after changing only a few settings and keeping the rest on max. the game looks amazing and runs at 60-70fps no problem. yes the performance at the start of the game is very poor but that is because you are loading in the map. after maybe 30 seconds CPU usage went down and i was at 40 fps on max settings + max raytracing. other than that the game is very fun and I defiantly recommend if you liked SE1

I can totally see the potential here. It's a little bare bones as of now but they certainly aren't hiding that fact. They have frequent dev blogs and an update schedule. There is still content here that's fun to play though and I think in it's current state it is worth getting.

I have to be honest. If you're not sure about buying this game right now, I would recommend waiting until the full release or future updates that may fix many of the bugs I've been plagued with. I think i will revisit once water or full game releases

Personally i love where its going but playing survival and smacking the planet at light speed and then trying to load back before that and its just wipes the save like you didnt have it and then saves over it. peak ♥♥♥♥. autosaves dont save their own save file but over your last save and keep saving it so good luck having a good save file that keeps you able to load back to before you mess up. Ill say i recommend it overall but for me atm its just annoying to mess up and have to either start over or go rebuild when im trying to relearn this game. it will get up there though from what i heard from its release till now.

It's Minecraft but with like...a million more block shapes and at least 2 more functions! Plus you can go off-planet to other worlds! Played the first game many hours, excited for all the improvements in the 2nd game already! And it's still in Alpha, barely getting started! It's reasonably playable too, I say reasonably because there's many blocks that say 'non-functional' and I just wish those capabilities were in the game now! So hard to wait. (So yes if that's not your thing, watch and follow the game, dive in with a purchase when it hits Beta or so.)

This game is already ahead of what the first game was at this stage of its development. Space Engineers 2 you can already tell has made tons of progress in its base gameplay and engine over Space Engineers 1. Is it feature complete? At this stage obviously not, its an early access title and features that are in the finished game Space Engineers 1 are not yet implemented in this one. The thing is, comparing a finished game to one that's still in early development is not a fair comparison. Rather, you look at what SE1 was at this stage in development and make a comparison to that. We didn't even have planets in SE1 at this stage for example and was largely empty space to play in as all we had were asteroids. We had multiplayer sure, but between that and a rigid 1 threaded cap of physics performance, it's a far cry to what we actually have in SE2. This is why I'm putting this game as a recommended title, because while we don't have multiplayer yet, we do still have far more in this stage of development than what we did in SE1 at its equivalent stage. If you're ok with playing in a singleplayer sandbox for a bit, go for it. If you want to wait for multiplayer or more functional blocks, that's fine too, feel free to wait for those to come. In either case, SE2 by far has improved a lot over SE1's development and has a ton of potential to surpass SE1 as Keen continues to work on the games features

Space Engineers 2 is good for what it currently is right now, a testable alpha experience. The reviews criticizing the game over it's current state are really uncalled for when most of them criticize the game for lack of content or systems. Keen didn't misadvertise and provided the information that you are paying for an alpha version that is in development at the moment. With that said, I do think the systems and direction that Keen is taking with SE2 is good and can't wait for further updates to improve the game even further. The engine is much more improved compared to SE1, and you can see that a lot of love is going into this project. Obviously there is much to be improved as well as far as the systems go, but I'm more willing to criticize individual features once the game is in more of a beta state. Alpha games are expected to be rough around the edges when it comes to design and implementation. Later on, I will update my review to more cater toward the final product whenever the game is in a Beta or Release state. If you DON'T want to play a game that is incomplete and may not function properly at times, then do not buy the game. If you support Keen and were a fan of SE1 and want to support and see the next generation of Space Engineers come to life, then buy it and try it out; it won't kill you.

Just getting through the tutorial is a slog because of the bugs. I've played this less than 2.5 hours and have fallen through the world 3 times. There seems to be no way to recover from this, so you have to load your save game. And when you select load, it asks if you want to save. I thought, sure, assuming it saves to a DIFFERENT save game. Nope, it saves to the file you are loading from. WTF is the point of that feature?!? Why would I want to save and then load to where I am now? Makes no sense. So guess what, now you don't have a save you can revert to and you are starting over. Also, there is one save file for each game, unlike other games that have multiple saves for one session. And when you use "save as", it starts saving to that file from now on instead of just once. I would refund, but I just went over the 2-hour window. This isn't worth the $20 I spent on it. TLDR - Save system sucks and its super easy to fall through the world when digging. Unknown how to avoid it at all. Avoid this game for a few years, it's like a pre-alpha stage.

Whoever decided to put a prompt asking you to save when loading a previous autosave should be kicked in the beans, repeatedly. No idea why this feature exists I can't see it accomplishing anything other than wasting the players time.