Hardspace: Shipbreaker Review

ign.com:

It’s one thing to blow up a spaceship; it’s another to dismantle it piece by piece, systematically reducing it from a hulking barge to a pile of valuable scrap. There’s a great sense of satisfaction in doing that job well, especially when performing it efficiently requires careful planning and carries a not-insignificant risk of killing yourself in a wide variety of ways in the process. Hardspace: Shipbreaker does a fine job of empowering us to carve up these gigantic space turkeys like every day is Thanksgiving and smothers it in a thick blue collar gravy, but it does wear thin with time. By the end of its campaign, the repetitive objectives and intentionally slow progression made shipbreaking start to feel like exactly what it’s simulating: hard labor.

Almost immediately upon stepping into the vacuum of space, an excellent tone is set with twangy music that takes me back to an early scene of the pilot episode of 2002’s Firefly, where the crew raids a derelict ship for valuables by cutting through the hull and floating away with them. Swimming through a shipyard with a full six degrees of freedom feels serene and control is smooth, thanks in large part to the brake button that allows you to come to a stop more or less whenever you like (as long as you don't run out of thruster fuel). Physics aren't truly Newtonian, in that objects will eventually slow to a stop, but innertia is a powerful force to be reckoned with in both your own movement and when moving objects around. And while the graphics and lighting aren’t cutting edge by any means the spaceship designs are distinctive, often asymmetrical, and interesting – if I hadn’t already known that the developer, Blackbird Interactive, is also at work on Homeworld 3, it