HG Wells’s 1889 novel, War of The Worlds portrays a futuristic, intergalactic war with an extraterrestrial race. In 1938, a radio broadcast of the same Novel by Orson Welles terrified the nation, which lead to the 1953 movie of the same name. It feels like ever since then, space has been almost exclusively the subject of alien invasions and gargantuan space wars. In fact, the first video game was called Space Wars and seemingly paved the path for many games to be themed to space combat. From Galaga to Halo, space has been the center of conflict, conflict players have fought many times over.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker delivers a new perspective to space games, and that is the perspective of the working man. Hardspace: Shipbreaker was available at the Focus Home Interactive Booth at PAX EAST. Hardspace: Shipbreaker was one of the last games I got to play before the COVID-19 Pandemic at PAX East 2020, and even in an earlier stage, the game was looking to be exceptional. Now, after some time in Early Access, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is ready to take off, and my impressions are interstellar.
Every functioning society needs that person that works between the seems. Discreet, quick, a face you see only briefly. In the real world, they are the garbage collectors that wake up before dawn, collecting a city’s waste on the back of a hulking machine. There are the baristas that make the morning coffee for the commute and the train conductors that make that train work. Flight attendants, bus drivers, crossing guards, delivery drivers, the real heroes are often the ones you don’t see and take for granted. For me, as a writer living in New Jersey, the man standing in the freezing cold pumping gas into my car is an essential pillar for making life sustainable, which fun fact, NJ and Oregon are the only two states in the United States where the law requires an attendant to pump gas for you. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, players are the handyman and scrapyard workers of the frontier. Even in space, ships deteriorate, get old, and get outdated. Yet, they still hold valuable resources and components, worthy of being recycled and reused, oftentimes for a profit. Scrapping and “breaking” ships is a dangerous task, but in the pursuit of paying off debt, any job is better than the consequences.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker first drew me in with that focus on the everyday working person. In recent years, games have been focusing on the smaller, yet important tasks of everyday life. Titles like Farm Simulator continue to make the successful stride, and the newly launched PowerWash Simulator tasks place with the cathartic tasks of Power washing. For me, I was drawn in on the simplicity, yet distinctness of Spintires: Mudrunner and its sequel, Snowrunner. Both games featured gameplay mechanics that proved remarkably, rewarding and even, cozy, driving a massive utility truck across the untamed wilderness, seeing the globs of mud and Earth fly from the tires, and using tools to rescue trucks and rebuild towns. One level in those games could last upwards of an hour or so. For Hardspace: Shipbreaker the same term applies, though thanks to feedback from Steam Early Access, they have implemented manual saves for players working on their ships. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, depending on the size of a vessel, and the abundance of raw materials, a single ship can take 45 minutes to 90 minutes, making the saves incredibly useful.
In comparison to my time with Hardspace: Shipbreaker in 2020, the game is much more realized, with more intricate animations and details. This demo brought along a small suite of tools and features. With the flick of a switch, I could toggle multiple scanners and modes. One mode is an X-Ray mode, detailing the signatures of electrical components and energy sources. Another scanner revealed the statuses of certain components and also revealed airlocks. Some ships are pressurized, with their oxygen systems still running. Players could either manually deactivate them, or blow a hole in the hull with tools of their choice. How it’s done, organize, or messy is entirely up to the player.
The enhancements were seen in every square inch of the demo, including the tools used. Each tool felt intricate and detailed and using them felt right if a bit cumbersome only because of the zero-gravity environment. Another tool worked like a gravity gun, taking in objects, then pushing them outward in a specific direction. The final tool I sued were explosives that could make short work of ship hulls, chopping them down quickly, but at the risk of destroying valuable
In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the goal is to pay back the debt, and every piece of the ship is valuable. Recycling metal for smelting is valuable, but meager compared to recovering altricial components, computer systems, and of course, the coveted reactor. Recovering reactors is the most challenging part of any ship, and varies depending entirely on the player. Removing a reactor can become like a skilled surgical extraction, where one bad move can not only destroy the reactor but wreck parts of the ship.
In my demo, I tried one of the newer, larger ships. All of the small touches, from air seeping out of the airlock to seeing the kaleidoscope of debris from shopping the ship felt delightful like you were a hard worker just doing the job that makes life sustainable. On my first job, I attempted to extract the reactor, much to my failure. I released the reactor from couplings within the ship without cutting a hole in the ship first. Doing so set off a chain reaction that destroyed the ship and various components, but some parts of the ship were still salvageable. Using the gravity gun, I took large chunks of the ship and threw them into the necessary gates, each gate labeled differently, depending on what is being disposed of. One gate is for scrap metal and the other is for computer parts and so on. As for the size of the ship, it was much larger than expected. Even after twenty minutes, I hadn’t even got through half of the ship, probably a quarter of it. The sheer depth and entails of Hardspace: Shipbreaker was astounding and I can easily see players simply engrossed in the sheer obstacle, and reward of breaking down such large vessels. These aren’t imitations but fully realized ships, with departments and bays to break down.
I switch ships during my time with Hardspace: Shipbreaker to a smaller, ship, more like a shuttle. This was much easier to tackle with its simple layout. This time around, I was able to successfully extract the reactor successfully, using the laser cutting tool to carve out a section of the hull, then destroying the couplings, and towing the reactor to the necessary gate. It was instant satisfaction, as the HUD lit up with the bounty that tI secured. With that, my demo was over.
Everything about Hardspace: Shipbreaker feels like a labor of love, which is fitting, of course. It felt disorienting flying in zero-gravity, but that was expected, and after some time, it felt natural. Everything felt responsive and refined, with no distraction to keep me from enjoying the cathartic sensation of doing good, honest work. The gameplay focus of breaking apart ships has been something I haven’t seen before, making Hardspace: Shipbreaker a one-of-a-kind game.
Perhaps moreover is the sheer good feeling get when Hardspace: Shipbreaker. I equate it to lawn work, working in the Summer heat with nothing but your machine, a can of gas, and yourself. After some passes with the machine, and about a half-hour of weedwhacker work, there is a lawn that you helped tamed, now sharp, acute, and clean. t’s a feel-good feeling that is very specific to such tasks, and that is the feeling I received with Hardspace: Shipbreaker a rewarding game of blue-collar labor that is out of this world.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is releasing on Steam on May 24th, including releasing the same day on GamePass for PC, with consoles to come later.
