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OFFICIAL Space Engineers (Review)

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Introduction

Space Engineers was developed by independent Keen Software House, and published through Steam Early Access. Designed as a voxel style crafting/survival game in space, using the VRAGE 2.0 engine, Space Engineers adds a refreshing alternative to the genre as a whole, being designed around a very interesting movement and crafting system. Fully mod compatible, the game features a tremendous amount of build options, gameplay styles, and server administration, for those wanting to host their own server. The game has done particularly well in Early Access, and has quite a large user base, and receives updates on a very regular basis. I must admit, when I first saw its availability almost a year ago, I dismissed it at once and didn’t think I’d really enjoy it. It did enter my mind a few times, and after entering an agreement with a few friends, finally got around to playing it – for a mere 72 hours gameplay over a few weeks. (I wasn’t crazy enough to play for 3 days straight).




Storyline

You take on the role of generic miner among countless thousands of other miners, who spends their entire existence dedicated to mining mostly iron and rock. You constantly forget to turn inertial dampeners off and float off uncontrollably, accidentally using up most of your suit energy to correct your flight mistakes during exceedingly important platinum mining. The real chore of your existence is waiting for that damn platinum to finish refining, only to find it’s because those pesky asteroids blew a hole in your giant asteroid and went straight through the single generator you had running on minimal uranium. You then discover that the parts needed to make another one – you do not have, as they drifted off into space ten minutes ago while you were busy doing another suicide run on that military transport (On what can only be described as a mechanical space hopper, for all the actual structural integrity you forgot to give it). You then spend the rest of your 83% of your suit energy frantically flying through a few kilometres of space to find another player’s station, either to ask him politely for some reactor components, or grind his face off and grind his reactor to pieces. Or, in turn, have your face grinded off in an epic grinder-lancing competition, disconnect, and then find another server to accidentally run out of uranium on.

That was one of about three hundred different storylines I’ve had, but in reality, there simply isn’t one for this game. Mine, build, destroy and kill. Don’t take it too personally, because charging at each other with grinders equipped is what you’ll spend most of your time doing on fresh public servers. At least until somebody crafts a sub-machine gun. Some men just want to watch the world burn.


Gameplay

Find a good server and stick to it. That is the key advice I can give. If you have doubts about a server, do not then spend 2 hours building yourself an empire, only to log in the next day and see a griefer has grinded everything to 50% and destroyed your med bay. (Med bays are your spawn points when you enter the game). I think I ended up on 3 different servers before settling on the fourth. One was terrible, griefers everywhere who didn’t actually want to play the game, there is no solution besides telling the admin and leaving, never to return. The second was good, but eventually fell afoul with a clan of griefers who would wait for people to log off and steal all their stuff, for no actual purpose of their own other than to cause mischief. The third, which I spent days and days on, had a terrible admin, who was very poor at managing his server, never updated, and also refused to export the files for our ships, including our rainbow death star which had a circumference of over two kilometres. When we lost the rainbow death star, we almost quit the game.

In the end, we hosted our own server, left it public, and set three admins to ban the griefers, and we had a ball of a time. About 64 hours of a ball in fact. We set ourselves some clear goals, some dreams, and started off abusing any and all mechanics we could for a couple of days before they all got patched. We ended up with a welding machine, a grinding machine (which one fellow who joined found immensely fun, and went off stealing ships to back them into the grinders and watch the destruction happen), a space platform inside the asteroid, defence systems, a fully controllable rotating airlock door on two sides of our asteroid, and a giant mining worm-like ship for burrowing holes into giant fresh asteroids. I even spent a whole 4 days on a project for the Star Citizen lovers among us.

Most of the gameplay begins with mining, with only a hand drill at your disposal. I strongly recommend players begin on the survival game types, where you begin with your own yellow ship, equipped with cargo, refinery and assembler. It’s a good idea to start off with a goal to create a dedicated mining ship, but you can retrofit drills onto your survival ship. You can make small ships, large ships, and stations, all with their own crazy roles, from a small fighter attack ship (for tactical strikes on enemy stations, or for attacking NPC ships), to large and very much mobile stations of all types. There are turrets galore, including small arms to attach onto your ships, including Gatling guns and missile launchers, and we also installed a mod for laser turrets. It is worth noting, when I played, the missile launchers that you put on ships tend to explode if you ship is travelling faster than the missiles, and destroy most of your ship (including you). So best to be stationary when firing, or just use Gatling guns. Another interesting weapon is tactical nukes, which you place down and destroy from afar. You can get creative, strap a tactical bomb to the front of a large ship with only a single forward thruster and a cockpit, aim and then blast the ship towards your target before leaping out in time. It makes for good crater shaping fun. Not so much for the poor fellow who was inside a bore hole trying to mine some nickel.


All placed blocks in the game have a progressive destruction model, so metal blocks bend and crease. Asteroids that hit a flat metal area will penetrate through, leaving a fair few of your blocks bent inwards with a hole through the middle. You’ll find you spend a lot of time repairing blocks that have been damaged, through asteroid shows, or from your own stupidity. Stupidity tends to account for most block damage, and general damage to everything, including yourself.

You can get pretty advanced in terms of mining, and setting up assembly lines and automated, well, everything. There are connectors and conveyors and blocks for almost everything you can imagine. There are always additions in terms of blocks when update time comes, and some of the mods available on the workshop are fantastic, one in particular being the Titan engine, which we were big fans of. There is simply so much you can do in the game, I could not tell you the things you might think of getting up to. As there are guns included, and things like rotors and pistons, we even though about making a shooting arena with mechanical interaction! Mine, build a ship or a few stations and maybe blow stuff up. There really isn’t a great deal to do in terms of endgame, as there simply isn’t an endgame, you just come up with ideas and figure out a way to build it. It took us 72 hours of gameplay before we burned out, but after a few weeks break, we were pretty excited to get back into it and show things off.



Controls

On first glance the control system is quite complicated. There’s a F Key shortcut to show all the controls on screen while you’re playing, which I found a big help during my first hour of play. After that, the control scheme becomes a lot more memorable, and you’ll find you pick it up quicker than you expected. Movement is very much a learning curve. The entire game is done with Newtonian movement unless you turn inertial dampeners on, which will drain your suit and reactor energy more, and mean you have to keep hold of a directional button to maintain speed. After a while I got comfortable without the use of inertial dampeners and would hit the 114m/s speed and turn off my jetpack/engines until I needed them again to slow down.

You might think building things is easier with no gravity, but one nudge of your ships frame, and it will start drifting uncontrollably until you pop boosters on each axis and turn the dampeners on. It’s frustrating, but an important feature that needed to be added in to reinforce the fact you’re an engineer in space. Ships control slower and more sluggishly the larger they get, meaning you need more engines, and often more reactors to power the engines, and allow for faster acceleration and deceleration. Not to mention turning - this becomes impossible to do in a spot of trouble when you’re in a massive capital ship. Best to ensure you have enough gyroscopes and engines to meet your mobility requirements. Try not to misjudge how long it takes your ship to stop, or you might find it hurtling towards an asteroid and smushing against it. Losing control of my ship or accidentally pressing a button can be crushing. Mainly because you then have to fly back to your base of operations, obtain some parts, and pray you can repair and rebuild your precious ship and fly it back to base.

Thankfully, you can fit landing legs to your ships or stations, and after pressing the lock key, you can clamp your ship to the station surface it’s landed on. From there it takes a fair beating to shake it off, generally enough to destroy half the ship or station. You can also employ the use of merge blocks, which allows you to create a kind of interchangeable ship, and also helped us make a ship which can tow just about any ship within a reasonable mass. I think to new players the controls are a nightmare, and movement is fear inducing, as it should be, but once you get used to the whole process and movement, it becomes beautifully fluid. Flying and drifting in space really is quite a thing, and requires quite a bit of skill for things like dog fighting, should you wish to pursue that kind of gameplay.



Video Settings

There are pretty much none. Some standard resolution settings, hardware mouse cursor (so it isn’t affected by FPS tanks, of which there are many), and your standard VSync. Beyond that there’s a Normal, High, and Extreme graphics choice. Unless you’re running a proper high end system, better than mine, extreme is not viable during the late game when you have a lot of ships and structures.



System Performance

As said previous, the game is pretty bad in terms of optimisation, then again it is still in Early Access. The CPU usage remains just above 50% most of the time, and almost acts as if it can’t use anymore beyond that, as on 1440p the GPU load was averaging at around 89%, but the framerates tanked a lot. When I was inside an asteroid with a fair amount of shops, assemblers, and generally a lot of placed blocks, the FPS was as low as 14 for most of the time when looking directly at objects. The rest of the time it danced between 22 and 35, with decent average framerates. This was all using the Extreme preset, so it’s advisable to use Normal or High settings on a generic system. There are also mentions on the forums that the game works better on the AMD FX 8 cores than the Intel i5 and i7’s for some reason, no real indication as to why this is. Without more optimisations the game runs pretty sluggishly when inside an asteroid (which is a lot of the time), however outside of asteroids it maintains a reasonable framerate around the 60 area.

1440p




1080p




Conclusion

All in all, despite expecting Space Engineers to not be my kind of game, my friends and I had an absolute blast. There were some pretty bleak times when we thought the community was generally just your typical teenage kids whose only purpose is to cause irritation. Fortunately there are some very nice servers around, you just have to spend some time to search around and get to know the admins. We probably lost a fair few hours’ worth of work on various ships and stations (so long, glorious Limpit), and it was mighty irritating. Once we finally got our own server going, and had six or seven random nice players join, the little community was actually a lot of fun. We were fortunate enough that was started halfway through the Early Access, so most players who joined were looking for people to learn with, and it was pretty great to experiment and have a laugh with some random people who were just as clueless as us. In the end we learnt the ins and outs of the games mechanics, crafting system, and various automated possibilities and started some pretty large projects of our own. Most of them took days to complete, but it really gave you the drive to complete your work, because the end result was actually usable in game as opposed to being a static object. We learnt a lot about thrust and mass, and how best to arrange things like gyroscopes by sheer trial and error. It really does take a lot of patience, but it feels pretty great in the end. The feeling soon becomes a drive to make more and more ambitious projects, and it surprised me just how much time I sunk into the game without truly realising.

The movement is fantastic, there’s nothing quite like drifting around in space in your suit. It certainly adds an extra layer of panic when you know your suit energy is alarmingly low and you’re quite far away from the nearest cockpit or med bay. The sluggish movement scales with ship size, the tiny ships being able to accelerate insanely fast and turn on a time, causing some pretty awesome flying opportunities. Conversely, the enormous cruisers and carriers we built would lumber through space accelerating extremely slowly, but instilling fear into people’s eyes when they saw a giant rainbow death star approaching at 2m/s, armed with disturbing happiness and colour.

One of the many issues I have with Early Access is that you tend to have a lot of fun with an unfinished game. Unfortunately we burnt out the joy in the game, and it’s still going through Early Access now, so we may never have known about additional features, because we got bored after the amount of playtime we had. As with most cases like this, when you go back to it, there’s always some project you want to do, and we quickly picked up the enjoyment shortly after picking up where we left off. I can heartily recommend this to most people who want to lovingly craft a very complicated ship system, just be aware that the bigger the ship, the longer it takes and the more planning has to be done beforehand. Not to mention you need to have the materials at your disposal, and that requires and awful lot of crafting and assembly productions in place and automated.

Nothing can quite take the joy away from the loving construction of the 300i. Even though it’s not the fastest or strongest ship I’ve made, it’s an absolute pleasure to fly in and activate the various systems I’ve put in place. Just bear in mind servers are extremely buggy, and optimisations are little shaky. Don’t make anything you’re hoping not to lose!

Space Engineers is available on Steam Early Access for £14.99/$19.99




 
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tyty for your reviews.
 
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tyty for your reviews.

Will start working on the next, Child of Light and Assetto Corsa are on the list, but I'm on holiday from Friday to Tuesday, so next review might not be until Tuesday/Wednesday.
 

Aquinus

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Those load numbers will change depending on the complexity of the world. As more is added it becomes more of a CPU bottleneck than GPU, but it starts bottlenecked on the GPU usually. This is one of those games where they could really utilize multi-core systems for physics calculations but they just do a poor job at leveraging it.

Good review/summary btw. I personally love the game but they have a lot to fix and improve.
 
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Those load numbers will change depending on the complexity of the world. As more is added it becomes more of a CPU bottleneck than GPU, but it starts bottlenecked on the GPU usually. This is one of those games where they could really utilize multi-core systems for physics calculations but they just do a poor job at leveraging it.

Good review/summary btw. I personally love the game but they have a lot to fix and improve.

We were saying last night, the game really broke our server severely. Spent about an hour fixing the server as it hadn't been online in a month. After we got permissions sorted it was fine, but the framerate was particularly appalling. Fresh worlds saw FPS around 100, but fully populated asteroids with 2 or 3 ships nearby made my framerate drop catastrophically to around 16-22 FPS.
 

Aquinus

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We were saying last night, the game really broke our server severely. Spent about an hour fixing the server as it hadn't been online in a month. After we got permissions sorted it was fine, but the framerate was particularly appalling. Fresh worlds saw FPS around 100, but fully populated asteroids with 2 or 3 ships nearby made my framerate drop catastrophically to around 16-22 FPS.
...and the most damning thing is that it's not even usually a GPU bottleneck, even on an i7. It's sad because it's a really fun game that has a lot of potential but so many times the issues have made me go play something else.
 
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...and the most damning thing is that it's not even usually a GPU bottleneck, even on an i7. It's sad because it's a really fun game that has a lot of potential but so many times the issues have made me go play something else.

Yeah I noticed my GPU usage in 1440p was actually going down! I thought to myself, why the hell is this happening? Then I saw that my CPU was literally capping out at 56% for some reason. Took a brief look at the forums and there were a number of threads regarding poor performance on Intel CPUs over AMD. Rather an odd outcome of events :laugh:
 

Toothless

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I love this game! When my desktop was running I'd play this so much but still couldn't find a decent server. Though it probably could be awesome if everyone wasn't sober playing it.
 
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