izigame.me

I picked up Space Engineers in 2013, almost 10 years ago. It was in Early Access for about 6 of those years. I dusted it off to see it now. Wow! Surely the game would be a night and day difference! Surely the hackiness and clunk was solved!
Nope.
The game is almost identical to how it was released 10 years ago. Seriously. The UI honestly has never once been updated, it's the same awful confusing monochromatic nightmare that takes far too many clicks to get anything done. Sorting through the 200 blocks is asinine because half of the look the same.
Keen Software apparently never once played another "build" game in those 10 years and thought to copy anything for a better experience.
Let's look at Satisfactory. In Satisfactory you have a "hand" inventory where you put your tools and weapons, and it's separate from your "parts" inventory. It also doesn't go off of your hotbar, it goes off of your mousewheel. You can build anything in Satisfactory from the build menu which is easily brought up with one button, you can see on the menu if you can afford it, and you can add things to a "to do" list so you can stick up your inventory.
In Space Engineers you have to do everything from the hotbar. You need to drag and drop icons to it (nothing intuitive like mousing over and pressing a number). Your tools and weapons take up space and every single block has to be put on the hotbar before you can build. It doesn't tell you you can afford anything before you try to build it. There's no tracker to track your inventory if you need to gather material to repair stuff, you have to manually write it down or memorize it. And... There isn't even an inventory sort button. Everything just gets piled up randomly, and sometimes won't even auto stack.
Performance is almost as bad as it was in 2013. It did improve, them they used the improvements to add things like planets which tanked performance again. It's a 10 year old game. I can run satisfactory without any slowdowns, this game gives you warnings that there's "too many blocks" even in the default scenarios. You just learn to play at 12 FPS.
Lastly the game has become a money grubbing DLC nightmare. The base game is $20 but the DLC is $60 and includes half the content. It takes a lot of chutzpah to think you're entitled to $80 for a game you have barely worked on in a decade.
Honestly I just can't get over the UI being exactly the same. Seriously not a single thing is different. It literally looks like a placeholder.
The only positive is the game's concept which is unique and cool. However, that doesn't excuse the fact that everything about this feels like nobody bothered to care. There's nothing wrong with taking ideas from other games, and they took nothing from anything.
I read some other reviews and people are talking about mods being the only worthwhile development aspect. More specifically the devs have FOOLISHLY gone on record saying they don't want to change the gameplay because it might "change how players are used to playing", which is an awful attitude.
The devs don't actually care about their game.
It looks like in 10 years they put in maybe six months of weekends to enhance the game. They even have a version of the game with the launch edition from 2013 you can get. Compare the content and tell me I'm wrong. Everything looks and feels and works the same. The part models are the same. The physics is the same. No solar system expansion or orbits. No flying to the sun. Speed caps at 100kph. The freaking SKYBOX never even changed.
So if they don't care, why should you? One of the absolute laziest dev teamd I've ever seen. They don't deserve your money.