Space Engineers

highly addictive

Lots of value, highly recommend it

We Had a Cunning Plan… Recommended: Absolutely. But keep an eye on your wheels. Four weeks ago I landed on a planet in vanilla Survival driving a rover and picking berries like a technologically ambitious monkey. Space Engineers has a steep learning curve. At first I thought the objective was to learn how to play the game correctly. I was wrong. The real objective, at least for me, turned out to be repeatedly asking: “I wonder what would happen if…?” I started in vanilla Survival, where every component mattered, fuel mattered, resources mattered, and mistakes had consequences. It was a brilliant introduction because it gave everything value. Building something that actually worked felt like an achievement. But eventually I realised the learning curve was slowing down my ability to experiment. So rather than grind through every unknown mechanic, I switched to Creative and treated it as an R&D laboratory. That transformed the game. Creative hasn't spoiled Survival for me; quite the opposite. It has allowed me to learn systems rapidly, experiment without worrying about resources, deliberately break things, understand why they broke, and blueprint successful designs ready for another day. When I eventually return to Survival, I'll be returning with knowledge rather than shortcuts. And then there is my slightly unusual co-engineer: ChatGPT. I play alone, but I haven't felt as though I've been learning alone. Having an AI alongside me to bounce ideas off, calculate things, explain mechanics, research solutions and—most importantly—help connect one discovery with another has completely changed the pace at which I've learned. I encounter something strange in the game, tell my AI partner what I'm seeing, and we work through it together. I test the idea in-game, report what actually happened, and that becomes evidence for the next idea. It's an extraordinary feedback loop: Try → observe → laugh → understand → adapt → try again. And there has been a lot of laughing. We recovered a wrecked shuttle and learned how projectors and blueprints worked. When I finally spawned the reconstructed ship, it immediately opened fire on the nearby Pirate Stronghold until its guns were empty. We naturally concluded that the pirates must have been responsible for its original demise. There is absolutely no evidence supporting this conclusion. We remain satisfied with it. While cleaning up the entity list one day, I also discovered page after page of mysterious one-block grids labelled Wheel. Obviously debris. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete. Some time later I zoomed out over the Stronghold and thought: “Where the f*** have all my wheels gone?” It turns out Space Engineers treats wheels as separate little grids. Twenty-two wheels should have existed. Twelve survived only as memories. The pirates were immediately blamed. That disaster then created a need to lift our crippled vehicles so we could repair them, which gave us an idea for a recovery pod for our heavy-lift platform, including an underslung operator's seat so I could actually see what I was picking up. Necessity is the mother of invention. Administrative incompetence is apparently the father. Then came Grasshopper, our experimental small-grid Prototech jump craft. It wasn't remotely finished when I accidentally deleted the construction platform underneath it. So Grasshopper's carefully planned maiden flight became: “Can you hover five metres while I put the bloody floor back?” It could. Beautifully. And suddenly another accident had given us useful flight-test data and the beginnings of an idea for a standard small-grid pod chassis. This has become our philosophy. There are no useless failures if you stop and ask what they taught you. Space Engineers is full of snakes and ladders. Our approach has increasingly become: When you encounter a snake, ask whether you can turn the bastard into a ladder. Blueprints were perhaps our biggest ladder. They solved preservation, experimentation and PCU pressure simultaneously. We could save discoveries, dismantle physical grids and reproduce useful designs later. We started calling BPs Balloon Parts: ideas we've inflated through experimentation and tied down so they can't float away. Then we discovered the Steam Workshop. I went looking for one useful small-grid printer blueprint. Through what can only be described as divine intervention by Clang, I somehow ended up with roughly 55,700 blueprints in my F10 menu. So now we have the Balloon Dimension. And that has introduced another lesson: don't reinvent every wheel—particularly after you've deleted twelve of them. Other players have already spent enormous amounts of time solving problems. Their blueprints are compressed engineering experience. Spawn them in Creative, operate them, reverse-engineer them, understand why they work, then take that knowledge back into your own creations. It feels like climbing a steep mountain and gradually noticing the worn footholds and pitons left by thousands of climbers who passed this way before you. My AI partner adds something resembling a jetpack. If the wall becomes impossible, sometimes the useful question isn't “How do we climb this?” It's: “Why are we still climbing the bloody wall?” And that's probably the greatest compliment I can give Space Engineers. The game is what it is, but it's also whatever you decide to make of it. You can survive. Mine. Engineer. Fight. Explore. Build beautiful ships. Build hideous ships that inexplicably work. Reverse-engineer other people's creations. Invent your own mythology. Start an imaginary engineering company. Blame pirates for your mistakes. Worship Clang. Spend an evening recovering twelve wheels you personally deleted. And if you're a solo player wondering whether there's enough here for you: absolutely. In fact, playing alone gives you enormous freedom to follow curiosity wherever it leads. Add the Workshop, Creative experimentation and—if it appeals to you—an AI collaborator to help research and reason through what you're discovering, and “solo” doesn't have to mean figuring out everything unsupported. Four weeks ago I was picking berries beside a rover. Now we've got a Pirate Stronghold, recovered ships, Prototech equipment, experimental jump craft, Thunderbird-inspired heavy lift, modular pod ideas, projectors, blueprints and access to tens of thousands of community creations. Do I know where we're going next? Absolutely not. That's rather the point. We know where we've been. At the end of each day we can look backwards and draw the map. Tomorrow we deliberately step beyond its edge and ask: “I wonder what would happen if…?” Sometimes you get a spacecraft. Sometimes you get knowledge. Sometimes you delete twelve wheels. All three have been worth it. 10/10 — would accidentally de-pixel my own vehicle fleet again. Laybak & Luvit Engineering: Have a cunning plan. Try it. Laugh. Learn. Blueprint whatever survives.

крутая игра

Im honestly addicted there is so much to do in this game and I haven't even downloaded a single mod yet and the community has gone wild with their builds. Highly recommend if you love space, combat, trial and error, and exploration

I've barely scratched the surface flying thru space, building, fighting , surviving, relaxing

An Incredible experience. A cosmic unforgettable world

I hope Klang will take less sacrifices from me for giving a review... I love this game with all my heart. It is challenging on levels, I could've never have imagined when I started playing some 10 years ago, and it still is. Still the most fun I've had in any game of my life. Takes an enormous amount of creativity, knowledge and engineering to achieve something beautiful. You can just wing it and hope stuff works, or you can calculate a lot of stuff. Once you start playing you will have an understanding of thrust to weight ratios, separating production processes, automation, binary programming, all the fun stuff. I could never recommend this game enough for anybody. Just beware of Klang and sometimes sacrifice something to keep it satisfied enough to not take stuff from you whenever it wants.