Space engineers: When the game works, it’s fun.

Space engineers: When the game works, it’s fun.

Commencing countdown engines on.

Check ignition and may god's love be with you.

I sit staring at a twisting icon set against a pale blue screen, distorted ever so slightly by static. “Waiting for server response,” I've really made the grade.
It’s been about fifteen minutes of worn patience: putting a server up, getting the settings right, making sure we all spawn in the correct place and juggling the head fry of installing mods in such a way as to leave our clients able to connect. It’s not difficult just utterly tedious, all this and I've had to change into my white cotton shirt.

Once through the door we had to contend with slow sim speeds, bad connections and occasional crashes, the servers lagging too and there’s nothing I can do; but it’s worth it. You see there is a deep seated sensual arousal laden deep in the loins of every nerd. Even the harder incel from the darkest pits of the internet will offer a flame of hope if it means getting the gratification of building and flying around in spaceships.

Minecraft in space, is probably the most succinct way of outlining space engineers. But it’s not necessarily fair to compare everything voxel based to the titular behemoth. Minecraft these days is a full realised thing bursting at the seams with content and years of refinement while space engineers is distinctly more bare bones in it’s sandbox. They are of course adding to the game but it’s generally slow and doesn’t ever feel like it might get there.

The physics of the game are distinctly abstract, given the aforementioned voxel structure, which is a nice way of saying they’re horse shit. The way thrust handles especially, with the position of thrusters being totally irrelevant, is an easy point on which to gripe: were I have any investment in the laws of physics. Instead, as I do, favouring the rule of cool: a far more fundamental force in our cosmos, I can let this slide. Especially as it has allowed for my friends invention, the rotating hammers of total calamity (patent pending), to massacre even the most powerful of dreadnoughts with ease.

There’s only a limited set of wacky novelties one can produce in this fashion, unlike something more construction orientated like besiege, and one can never really categorise their usefulness. There’s no state of play as such, just the open, objective-less sandbox. This is freeing in part but also leaving much of the experience hollow and without direction. Mucking about very much is the game play and the endgame all rolled into one.

All the survival mode does lengthen this process with the continual setbacks that come with Trying to drag tonnes of rock down into the atmosphere of the planet safely. A friend of mine very much seems to get his rocks off to just this very thing. The big bertha, is a horrendous poxed lump of scrap that looks like someone built a spaceship out of rubbish bins and old shampoo bottles. Yet as far as industrialism is concerned it is a powerhouse having ventured to strange new worlds in search of more materials to fuel it’s abdominal maturation.

I get my kicks spending too many hours building sci-fi inspired ships, reminiscent of those in the shows i spent my childhood watching instead of being outside, trading one radiation box for another. It’s an itch then when scratch leaves me purring like a cat, a rather disturbing sight i assure you. Digital miniature construction, my sickly battered creations could be put up in the corridors of digital tank museum, a sort of nerdy interstitial between exhibits. But alas that is too high to aspire.

So with a space building game on one hand and a pile of issues on the other where does that leave us. Floating aimlessly through the void of space without fuel watching the gauges on our life support systems slowly tick down. Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles i’m feeling very still….