Space Engineers Review (Rad Colmic)
With the New Multiplayer Update launched I finally felt it was time to review this game.
Firstly this game is unlike any really out there, the scale and scope is unique and understanding that will help you understand current limitations and issues. The game is not perfect yet but this multiplayer update has set the stage for that.
Before the update I would not have recommended this game, it shines in the possibility of working together to build things with a team. Doing it solo is fun but without others to pose a threat or work together it can get tedious over time.
A thing that is mind blowing is being able to walk on a moving ship/vehicle. Next is the physics and destruction. In this game you can actually rip a ship in half either by weapons, or by actually crashing through it. Seeing gaping holes in the side of a ship after a battle is an awesome site to see. Before the update walking on a moving ship in MP would result in your quick death due to sync issues. Now I can say it works as intended. It’s amazing to be running around trying to get to a fighter to launch. Note another great thing, that fighter is not a prefab set item. It must be designed and built first and has the same physics and destruction as the ship around it. A cargo container breaks loose? Might bounce around the inside shredding up internal components. Decided to take your helmet off? Well that rocket that just punched a hole in the hull just sucked out all the O2 in the room. Like to mine? Well mining is all voxel, and the terrain deformation is great. Crash your ship expect a crater. Drop a bomb? Well the ground will be torn up too.
Next is scale, when the game says planets, it means planets. There is no cheesy loading screen and the planet(s)/moons are massive. To give you an idea. It easily takes 30-40 mins to get around one. Now try to search the entire thing? Days of searching. While you search you may miss a base, why? Well it is because the player decided to build it underground and made tunnels.
When you take this scale into account you can begin to imagine the limitations. Firstly this game takes a lot of processing power. It will push your graphics and CPU hard. The RAM usage for minimum is 8GB and recommended is 16. That is not normal for many games. This is not however the full story. Games that I will call Normal use tricks to limit things. Tricks and such make performance better. This game does not do that. There is a positive and a negative on this. You full well may make a ship as large as a Star Destroyer to scale, but over time the requirements to simulate the ship will slow your PC down to a crawl. The requirements then shoot through the roof.
This however leaves the player to create to his hearts content as long as he/she has the proper PC hardware to do so.
This leads to multiplayer. If you want 64 players or an MMO experience this is not that. Above I was talking about single-player. Now imagine what 64 players will do. The server is doing player position calcs ALONG with all the ships/vehicles (vehicles meaning wheeled) and moving parts (that huge elevator that moves freely you made? Yeah that is considered a vehicle, that sliding door that folds inward= many vehicles) it is also doing the physics calcs on these and calculating the building of components and lets not get started with remote controlled drones. There are limits and as players build more the harder the server needs to run as it is all being simulated. For an MMO experience this would require a server farm and thats not for a huge number of players. Over time the games size and complexity and stress on the server will only grow as the players add more and more to the world.
However, it is this freedom that leads to this double edged sword. That is why your experience on a server will vary greatly based on how the admin runs the server. Stricter rules means better performance but less freedom. It will come down to testing out servers.
I can recommend this game highly now with the improved multiplayer. The stage it currently is in is stability and less about adding core features but that is a great step and the Modding community is amazing too. Countless mods are out there to add layers of additional features that make the games play-ability nearly endless. For instance with the new MP update work is being done by modders to add the ability to jump from one server to another with a ship. Allowing for a decentralized server setup and allowing for more to be done with cheaper hardware. The modding is not just items I am getting at. Core features can be added and have been added. The devs have even adopted some mods to the game.
One draw back is time. This game takes a lot of time to play. It is not a new user friendly experience and you will need to look at tutorials and actually learn the game. Work is now being done to make the new user experience better with better tutorials.