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.