Disassembling spaceships with laser cutters and explosives? Sounds like an action game, but it’s a scrapping simulation with fun physics effects.
Space battles with deadly laser duels, rocket swarms and fast-paced dogfights: You won’t experience any of that in Hardspace: Shipbreaker …. Because in this space simulation you also dismantle spaceships – but quite peacefully.
Piece by piece, as a lonely scrapper in an astronaut suit, you take apart various types of spaceships using lasers or explosives and throw the recycled material into the melting furnace, the recycling plant or a waiting freighter.
For impatient players, this sounds about as exciting as a trip to the yellow, blue or black dustbin. But if you like to efficiently dismantle stuff, have a lot of patience and want to experience an unusual simulation with funny ideas and physics gimmicks, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is for you!
And: Your job can end deadly even without space battles, because nasty dangers lurk during the disassembly process.
Table of Contents
Hello! Haaaalloooo?
Hardspace: Shipbreaker creates a believable, oppressive alone-at-all atmosphere. Your recycling yard hangs in orbit, as a lone scrapper you float weightlessly in a spacesuit around the currently selected ship, venturing inside. Forwards and backwards, drifting sideways, rotating, braking – all this can be done by mouse and keyboard or by gamepad and works great after a little practice.
Your two main tools are a laser for cutting and a kind of electric throwing hook with which you attract, move or push away components. With explosive charges and remote detonators you can disassemble parts of the ship even faster – but you have to be especially careful not to destroy valuable parts. Or hit a power line. Or a fuel tank. Or even the reactor. If you recycle the detached components correctly, i.e. put them in the yellow, blue or black bin, you get a bonus and a yellow indicator bar fills up at the top.
But if you screw up, so to speak, by throwing a can of dog food into the paper bin or laser-cutting something valuable, then credits will be deducted and the bar will fill up red from the right. We’ll come to that in a moment. Just one thing in advance: You’re doing all this to work off your fantasy billions in debt that your education supposedly cost. Every litre of air and fuel, every repair shows up on your payslip, even the payslip costs extra.
These socially critical exploitative undertones in occasional text messages wear thin quickly, though. It’s like real life: If you have so many debts, eventually you don’t care about anything anyway.
Deadly Physics
Hardspace: Shipbreaker scores points mainly with its physics system. When you pull components out of a ship, they realistically dengel to obstacles or other floating parts, bounce off, rotate wildly.
You can experiment a lot, for example, using so-called connectors to string individual parts on a kind of electric cord and detach them from a freighter with a powerful pull. Or you can blow up a fuel tank with a laser cutter and save yourself a lot of manual work, but risk a credit deduction if valuable parts go missing in the process.
One of the most delicate components are the ship’s reactors. For one thing, their radiation is deadly. If you’re too close, your readout will blur and your health will drop. Secondly, you have to dispose of a plucked-out reactor properly as soon as possible, otherwise its core will melt away. That’s why planning is everything, you should above all uncover a sufficiently large access to quickly manoeuvre the reactor block out of the ship and push it into the freighter.
Your ship. Your way.
Such situations are exciting and very intense, but Hardspace: Shipbreaker also saddles you with a lot of repetitive grunt work: cut/blast, sort, recycle, all over again. In exchange, you can play however you want. It’s up to you whether you carefully dismantle a ship and dutifully deliver every piece of the puzzle, or simply cut it up wildly and even accept credit deductions.
Depending on the difficulty level and settings, you will also have a limited supply of suit fuel and, above all, oxygen. Therefore, you must regularly float back to a maintenance station to refuel. During testing, we became more and more daring and often flew to the petrol station on our last breath.
Occasionally you will also find oxygen bottles, medikits and repair cases for your tools in the scrapping ships. You will also occasionally come across decorative objects such as posters or plush bunnies for your living container.
In the toilet
Every time you dispose of ship parts correctly, your credits bar fills up. In career mode, this bar has several sections. Each filled segment brings you additional staff points (= experience points) as well as coins for upgrades. In career mode you can play your way up to level 30. However, this is a long way, depending on how you play, you will work 20 to 30 hours to reach it.
When upgrading equipment in your spartan living container, however, relatively little happens in the back. The improvements mainly affect the technical data of your handful of tools – for example, more range or durability for your throwing hook, or more oxygen capacity for your helmet. The developers have obviously run out of ideas here. The incoming radio messages or text messages from your buddies and superiors are also very generic and irrelevant, the exploitation gags wear out quickly.
Little background
Every few levels, however, a new type of ship is added for you to dismantle. In the free game, you can directly choose your desired wrecking ship. At release, however, there are only a handful of them in different variations, and most of the ships are not really complex either.
The interior is procedurally generated, but you don’t take apart Star Destroyers à la Star Wars, for example. The third mode is a regular challenge in which you have to disassemble a given ship quickly and efficiently in order to be among the top players in the online ranking. There is no real multiplayer mode.
The great strength of Hardspace: Shipbreaker clearly lies in the demolition work itself, less in a motivating career with new game elements or real surprises.
Editor’s Verdict
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is one of those games that you either totally like – or shrug and ignore. Even those who love space simulations will not automatically have fun here! Because the sequences soon become repetitive and at times degenerate into work, the game lacks real surprises and unforeseen events.
But those who like to fiddle around, experiment or comfortably disassemble and sort on the easiest difficulty level will experience an unusual simulation here. It is precisely the freedom to try out different tactics, together with the slightly oppressive, very well staged space atmosphere, that makes it so appealing. I realised just how much the game engages me when I was out walking: as I marched under a bridge, I unconsciously checked its pillars and supply lines for possible interfaces …
