hardspace: shipbreaker first impressions

There's a lot to like about Hardspace: Shipbreaker if you're a hard sci-fi fan like me. It's a realistic and detailed spaceship scrapping game about overcoming the crushing boot of space capitalism through unionization. What more could I ask for?

You play as a scrapper, taking apart spaceships and sorting its parts into bins. You have to worry about fire, electrical, and chemical hazards. You need to disconnect fuel lines and eject fuses. You need to place demolition charges, push items around with the force fields your handheld utility grapple emits, and avoid getting crushed between large, heavy panels.

There's quite a bit of detail in how scrapping works and I found it quite enjoyable. However, it falls a bit short for me. Of course, if you know me, I'm a sucker for mechanical details. I love games that have heaps of it that you can get lost in, like Project Zomboid, Factorio, and High Frontier 4 All. You might expect me to say that I would love it if the systems in Hardspace: Shipbreaker were so inscrutably complicated that you'd have to read a manual just to know how to take apart a cockpit without damaging everything... and you'd probably be right! But this isn't my main criticism. My main criticism is that Hardspace: Shipbreaker feels like a pre-planned choreographed affair.

For example, to take apart a ship, it's easiest to use your laser cutter to disintegrate predefined cut points that you can find throughout the ship. After these cut points are removed, you send all of the freed exterior panels to the processor. Then, you need to deal with various features that all require you to follow a certain number of specific steps. To remove the power generator, first disconnect three fuses. To remove a particular kind of thruster, first destroy the four pipe connections and then close the fuel shut-off valve before it all blows up. To remove a nuclear reactor, first disconnect the fuel and the coolant. And so on. Every "puzzle" is little more than a set of rigid steps.

I think I would enjoy the game a lot more if scrapping a ship was more open to interpretation -- if there were many ways to deal with each situation and if those situations had different initial conditions that prevented you from using the same process each time. Even better, if those systems were connected together in surprising but logically consistent ways. Right now, it seems that your engagement with these mechanics is largely limited to figuring out how to speedrun scrapping a spaceship. I'm not really interested in this; I just want to have fun playing around with puzzles.

In a similar fashion, the story also feels like an autoscroller. The writing is great, the voice acting is great... but when enmeshed with gameplay, it takes so long to run its course that it overstays its welcome. And, it doesn't seem to matter how well I scrap ships or whether I participate in the union's activities. My coworkers always react in the same way, producing a strong sense of ludonarrative dissonance. I just scrap ships and the story moves on without my input... while still trying to include me as if I had made choices that affected it! It feels weird.

I think this game would have been much better if it was shorter, had deeper non-choreographed mechanical systems to play with, and responded to player choice at least a little bit. It would be nice to see a sequel or a spiritual successor do this.