Space Engineers Preview

Space Engineers is a sandbox; build what you want in space game where currently, there isn’t a great deal you can play around with. To kick things off, you’re all alone on a platform in the middle of nowhere, armed with a load of blocks and your imagination. While there is no end game objective in this build, you can still have a lot of fun creating penis shaped rockets or spend time lovingly recreating the Enterprise then running it full speed into something in order to witness the glorious destruction of your creation.

The process of building your spacecraft is surprisingly easy to understand. Simply bring up the building menu then drag the components you want to use to your hotbar, though everything has to start from somewhere and you have access to three core blocks: station, small ship and large ship. Upon selecting this core block, the rest of the components and materials will adapt to your choice and you’re free to craft whatever your minds eye wishes, simply point to where you want your block placing and left click; simples.

After giving your build a cockpit and some thrusters, you’re set to jump in and give it a spin in the cosmos, which in my case inevitably led me face first into an asteroid just to see what kind of damage I could cause. Panels flying everywhere, bulkheads crumpling, fragments of my once pristine Knobjet 3000 drifting into the unknown. The destruction is quite pretty to witness and after all that I had the fun of rebuilding it again.

You’re also not limited to where you create your masterpieces either; while you do start on a platform when you enter the game, you could either build there or set off with your jet-pack to a quiet corner of space to start building. Hell, if you wanted to I guess you could even build a space station around an asteroid, so go right ahead and do what you want in this game.

Thankfully, if you’re not quite adept at building instantly, there are a few fully created ships to cock about in when you load a new world so you can get to grips with the whole flying in space, or if you wish, adapt these pre-built entities into something even more glorious. Additionally Space Engineers has access to the Steam Workshop where you can find amazing creations from the community ranging from cruisers from StarCraft to massive behemoths such as the Super Star Destroyer. At the time of writing this preview, there are 140 pages worth of community created content for the game which you can happily download and view, fly and destroy yourself.

Right now, it’s hard to judge what kind of reception Space Engineers will have when the game comes round to its official launch, especially as it is currently a solo experience, but it’s already encouraging to see so many players pouring hours of love and dedication into their spacecraft that I will recommend grabbing the Steam early access when you can.