Space Engineers - Brilliant...

This week in CookeRS Reviews, I'm in space! - Space Engineers is a relatively new PC title available through the Steam Platform as an 'Early Access' game for around $20. The game falls under the sandbox/survival genre, situated in the infinite reality of space. The game, whilst still under development, is maintaining a pleasantly playable state. This is with thanks to a highly commendable team of developers who are successfully keeping the game and it's increasing popularity, running whilst still managing to implement weekly content updates and bug fixes. There are certainly a lot of higher budget games with higher paid developers that need to take notes from the developers of Space Engineers.

Space Engineers - www.spaceengineersgame.com

The Space Engineers developers are also ones for listening to their gaming community. Their forums located here are daily bombarded with suggestions, complaints and compliments of which they appear to pay strong attention to. A large majority of posts on these forums are in positive light of the hard work that the developers are putting in to both please the community, and keep the game in line with it's focus.

In my eyes the game is (oversimplified) 'Lego in Space' or 'Minecraft in Space' with a survival twist if you choose. The Survival aspect so far is a bit limited, with the only thing to really 'survive' against is your slowly dwindling 'energy levels' (which can be easily topped up from any ship or medical bay); or an optional barrage of meteors that will occasionally bare down on your base, in which you need to build turrets to defend against. Outside of that however, there are no NPC's, Friendly or Hostile for you to interact with, which does leave you at times feeling a like you're lost in space.

Mining Ship built for gathering resources and clearing asteroids.

Mining

Despite this lacking in NPC interaction, the game makes up for it in it's other well developed aspects. The resources in which you build with in Survival mode all need to be collected from neighbouring asteroids through a drill, either by hand, or on a ship. Above is a screenshot of my first mining ship I used to collect resources and shape my home base asteroid.

My first interpretation of a Star Wars Tie Fighter.

Building

Building is still being developed but the major parts are all implemented. There are a variety of building blocks from cubes, to slope blocks, corner blocks, and more. There are also relevant functional blocks such as thrusters, cockpits, weapons, gyroscopes, reactors, welders, drills, and all the rest. The building in survival mode requires you to place a framework for the ship, and then weld each of the parts together. This gives a realistic feel to the game, and adds a sense of value to your ship when you considering some larger ships may take you hours, or even days to complete. The building formula is a bit of a balancing act. Yes you can make a huge ship with 1000 guns and all the bells and whistles, but without enough reactors and thrusters to power your ship, it's going to be hard to do anything with it. Design and engineering really have a part to play in this game which greatly engages your creativity.

Meteor hits my base!

Damage and Destruction

Crashing giant ships into each other at high speed in space? YEAH THAT'S COOL! The damage and physics in this game are right on cue. Above is a picture of one of my buildings that a small asteroid has hit. The damage looks fantastic as the metal bends and warps, it then needs to be welded back together again to be repaired. Sometimes you can lose entire chunks of your base or ship to the endless vacuum of space. Touching back on the physics, still in alpha testing and this game has done a fantastic job. I'm sure the final product will be even better. The vacuum of space and lack of gravity are entirely apparent, if you run out of power on your ship, it's going to just keep on floating through space forever, (or until it is so far away it gets deleted). There is also no 'up or down, left or right' as far as space is concerned, this is something that can be a bit daunting and disorientating for a new player, but it's very cool nonetheless.

Hangar internals, built into a meteor.

The other stuff

There are currently three building categories, 'Big Ships, Small Ships, and Stations'. Small ships (like my Tie Fighter), are quicker to build and require less resources. They are useful to start off with. Stations are essentially where you keep your ships, and are a place to land and refuel. Above is a picture of on of the hangars I built underneath my station inside an asteroid. There really is no limits to your creativity in this game. Big ships are, believe it or not, bigger than small ships, with a few more component options such as gravity generators, automated turrets, glass, and refining/assembling machinery. With a combination of each of these you can have your space fleet ready to dominate the galaxy!

The Multiplayer is well developed in it's current state, you can join other servers or host your own and play with as many players as your computer will support. With other players you can build together, have space battles, or just show off your creativity to one another as you build your new ships. The 'Combat' is functional, but a bit underdeveloped, you can destroy your fellow engineer's ships and bases with rockets and machine guns, but it feels a bit like griefing at times as the 'Factions' aspect of the game is yet to be implemented, where you can actually assign teams to each player. On top of this, the 'space combat' is certainly nothing from a flight simulator, but it does feel somewhat realistic.

With the implementation of new features and possibly some more NPC's and things for us to 'Survive Against' this game is on it's way to being a 5-star survival sandbox game. I am an increasing fan of this game as each week the developers manage to squeeze even more awesomeness into this fantastic game. I would highly recommend this game to anyone who has ever loved Lego (and yeah that's everyone), or who is a fan of any building games like Minecraft. It's one of the coolest concepts I have seen in PC gaming in a long time.

Congratulations to the developers for such a fantastic start on such a promising game, keep it up!

Overal Rating: 4/5 (Alpha Verison 01.033.010)

Gameplay: 4/5 - Needs NPC interaction and more developed multiplayer (in my opinion)

Difficulty: 3.5/5 - Space takes some getting used to, can be daunting at first, persist with it!

Multiplayer: 3/5 updates and more multiplayer content needed, but is supposedly on it's way.

Value: 4.5/5 - $20 AUD (Steam)

Graphics: 5/5 - Spot on for this genre and game style

Sound: 2.5/5 - Nothing standout, but this is only Alpha

Likes: Building to essentially no limit, plenty of features and engaging creative gameplay.

Dislikes: Lack of NPC interaction, fairly dull 'combat' in this alpha version, will hopefully be developed.

What's happening to me?! - FarmVille 2 and my wait for some new games... (Reaper of Souls and Hearthstone + PS4 Titles)

I guess it's what these games are made to do, but I am rather hooked on Zynga's "FarmVille 2" title on the Android tablet. Never a fan of the original, but this one sucked me in with an effectively placed Play Store advert.

Zynga's "FarmVille 2"

Meanwhile, the PS4 is sitting by the wayside waiting for some new games to come into the playing field. I may even pick up a copy of Thief or pre-order Infamous: Second Son today, both titles are of some interest to me. The fact that I am playing FarmVille shows that I do need to find some serious games to play, and fast!

Diablo III has been on the playlist a bit lately, for those who are unaware, the game's loot system was scrutinized upon initial release for taking away from it's predecessors 'smash and grab' looting style, where the player was motivated to continue destroying monsters with promise of better loot. The initial Diablo III looting system was far too 'random' and items that were dropped, even by the 'hardest' bosses would often be of no use to the player, making the system feel broken and too reliant on the 'Real Money Auction House'. My Girlfriend and I (who have sunk a few hours into the game on Co-Op) are more than familiar with this phenomenon.

However, after much crying from the community, the recent Diablo III patch introduced the 'Loot 2.0' system. A refined looting system where the items dropped by monsters and bosses are not only more rewarding with difficulty, but are more specifically tailored towards the character which the player is using. Loot will occasionally still drop that is suited to other classes, but this is at an acceptable rate and still allows for players to occasionally trade or swap gear pieces. It is strange that the patch also removed 'Gold Trading' but I'm speculating as to whether this is a temporary change whilst the loot 2.0 is introduced. And lastly, come March 18th the 'Real Money Auction House' will be shut down. Hooray! This is of course all leading up to the release of Diablo III's first expansion pack, 'Reaper of Souls'.

Diablo III - Reaper of Souls Expansion Pack

This is an exciting one, Diablo III - Reaper of Souls. I just want to start by saying, if you haven't seen the teaser for this game, do yourself a flavor and check it out on Blizzards YouTube page. (yes a 'flavor', cause this one tastes good!!!)

First things first, this is definitely one of my favourite blizzard cinematic trailers of all time. The feature list for the expansion isn't bad either. The addition of a new "Adventure Mode' and level 70 becoming the new maximum level are just the beginning. A new class the "Crusader" is being introduced as well. The crusader would appear to be a hybrid between Monk and Barbarian, whilst he would appear a rather 'tanky' class, the Monk and Barbarian will actually take a passive 30% less damage than the Crusader, so one would assume the Crusader has a lot of mitigation utility considering he generally in close combat (EG: his shield). Check out the Crusader video for a more detailed outline of the new class.

It's a big month for Blizzard Entertainment, shutting down the Real Money AH in Diablo III was a start. They also announced the Pre-Purchase for "World of Warcraft - Warlords of Draenor", and on the 25th of this month the "Reaper of Souls" expansion will be available. To top that off, on March 11, "Hearthstone" Blizzards casual 'card game' was released on PC and MAC. The Beta was rather successful with much player interest, and I expect the game will do rather well as it is somewhat unique and has a good plethora of characters and story creating the foundation for the game. The real test will be to see how successful the Android and iOS versions of the game will be, that for me is where a game of this style would be most successful, and is certainly the platform that I will be playing the game from.

All said and done for now, this month of March is looking somewhat exciting for the PC gaming world, and if I do manage to get my hands on a new PS4 title soon, we'll see how that goes...

CookeRS