Space Engineers is a game that I'd call "Wasted Potential". Being the only game of its type that I'm aware of, Space Engineers has essentially been the flagship game for anyone who wanted to build spacecraft, planetary colonies, space mining or replicate things they've seen on many popular Sci-Fi shows by virtue of being the only choice. Perhaps it was that lack of competition, or just the lack of an ability to deliver on the core concept, but Space Engineers seems to fall flat at any given chance to deliver on the premise it tries to do.

I want to start by talking about my experience as a new player. While The First Step scenario was a good introduction to the very basics, Learning To Survive was an awful scenario for that purpose. The core loop of space engineers is one of procedural refinement - gather raw resources, turn those into components, and turn those components into actual, useable items to create your larger structures, but neither tutorial actually explains that to start that process, you need to refine *stone* to get the resources needed to actually *build* the machinery needed to refine other items. As someone who had never played the game before, approaching this was maddening - I couldn't build a refinery because I needed resources that I could only get from a refinery (or so I thought), and that left me in a place where it seemed like I couldn't actually craft or build anything. The rest of the scenario tried to introduce you into some concepts, like automation, combat and different ideas for ships, but a lot of the time pushed you towards using pre-made solutions to each stage rather than creating your own with some guidance. The Ship building task stands out as being one of the only tasks that actually encouraged you to make something of your own design, and even then a lot of the work was already done for you - and you'd already been given a bigger ship with better facilities. You have a really interesting idea in the ship production bay, using pre-made blueprints to automatically construct ships from components - fantastic! But... how do you make one? Or, how do you make a blueprint? You're asked to do combat, but you're not provided with any ship that has good armaments, or told how to make armaments (because you're never introduced to assemblers), which meant my solution was charging at the enemy blindly with my grinder to hack the ship to pieces. When you thought you'd done all the tasks and then expect the objective of the scenario to advance, you find out that there's actually more objectives - but they're too far away to show on the HUD, which means that you have to backtrack and look around for a while just to find the tutorials that you're expected to do (assuming the game doesn't bug out and not mark them or allow you to complete them), until at last you're given your final series of objectives, and this is where my biggest bugbear gets into play.

Space Engineer's achievements are awful.This scenario has two worth noting - destroy a base without entering the planet, and complete the scenario deathless. You're tasked with taking out a pirate base that's about 40km out from the start of the planet's gravity well, and if you enter that gravity well, you'll fail the achievement. Now, it's quite difficult to actually gauge whether or not you're hitting something when you can't actually see your target, and before now, the player hasn't been introduced to *anything* about planetary building or combat - so the game hasn't told you that Ion engines don't work in atmosphere. Truthfully, I don't know how you'd be expected to complete this scenario normally given that actually getting onto the surface of the planet with any ship you're likely to have built thus far is nigh impossible because they all have Ion engines. You can't shoot it from orbit because every single weapon has a range of less than 3KM, so my solution was placing warheads in a ship and using a remote control to *eventually* manage to steer it into the pirate base. Turns out, that's not the final objective, and in actuality, the final objective is taking out one of the best armed, strongest AI ships in the game. Now, I managed to repeat my old grinder tactic to take out the ship and finally get past this awful scenario deathless for the second achievement (eventually), but if I'd messed up, I would've had to reload a save (and reloading gets messed up fast because of the fact that the game's autosaves aren't separate from the main saves, they're just saved over your most recent one - making creating a backup point unnecessarily tedious). The bad achievements don't end there though - there are several multiplayer only achievements (the emote one barely functioning because despite it being years since the problem first emerged, they've never fixed the bug where you CAN'T EMOTE), the achievement for completing the Frostbite scenario (one of the single worst and most boring ideas you could have had in this game - let's give the player forced grounded combat with ♥♥♥♥♥♥ enemies and massively restricted building options! Because who wants to have space and engineering in a game about SPACE ENGINEERS), and finally the ones for the Never Surrender scenario which manage to make the core concept about defending against waves of relentless enemies into the most boring, tedious and buggy thing I've had the misfortune of playing in a very long time. 50% of the time, you'd kill the enemies and the wave just... wouldn't end, and you'd have to wait five minutes for the failsafe to kick in and let you move on, because this game is allergic to polish and has more bugs than a Tyranid Hive-Fleet. Did I mention that, for the 1000 drones achievement, you'd be expected to get up to wave 170 or so at the minimum? And that waiting for the failsafe even half of the time, would take nearly EIGHT HOURS OF POINTLESS WAITING??

Now veterans might say "But you don't come here for the scenarios, it's the core gameplay that's the main attraction!" and I'd counter that with "what gameplay?". This isn't a game like minecraft where you've got a lot of ways to advance your character, or express creativity - on the contrary, there's only a tiny handful of problems that you can engineer a solution to, and your character remains entirely static in terms of strength. So you built a mining ship to mine ore, to refine it at a glacial pace, to get a ton of resources to... build a ship, maybe? To attack enemies that, by-and-large, just don't exist? Or, maybe it's to trade with NPC's and... get resources to build a base to defend against... nothing. There's no push, no threat, no *reason* to build up and build out aside from creative impetus, which would be fine if the game didn't lock 80% of it's blocks behind DLC. Engineering is the human solution to practical problems, but this game doesn't actually *HAVE* any practical problems to solve, unless you go out of your way to create them yourself. It's an answer to a question that just doesn't exist.

That's why I think this game is wasted potential. Instead of having fun, using the sandbox to create cool vehicles and overcome the game's challenges, I spent most of my time pottering around looking for something to do, or some reason to build a solution to a problem. Combat was dull and poorly balanced, building was massively restricted by insane cost, gathering resources was completely fine but refining them took far longer than it needed to, and the pre-made content the game came with was so poorly thought out that it almost made me quit playing before I learned how to. I was hoping at least, for a fun sandbox with engaging content to give me motivation to interact with the game world, but instead I found there wasn't one. Just a lot of rocks floating in space, some with an atmosphere, and an endless slew of barely-worth-interacting with systems that seemed to punish creativity not backed with financial expenditure. Sadly, just not worth it.

one of the worst user interfaces I have ever seen, which might not have been an issue if the tutorial actually taught anything....2.7 hours trying to make a windmill (i only know I'm supposed to do that because I visited forums and reddit posts) but nothing is explained, absolutely no guidance of any kind, i cant find anything, crap ton of containers but gawd only knows how i put anything in them when accessing them only shows me a list of things I don't have yet...and we're not even talking about glitches yet: refinery has no keypad to access it, tracking for materials in the ground are rotating across map at a steady rate, drill stops working after a few meters down, energy only lasts 4 minutes tops which barely enough time to do anything, most everything is missing labels, youtube tutorial vids seem to have several dozen rooms and machines that don't exist on my map, the list goes on... tried uninstalling and re-downloading but the same issues... I'm guessing the rest of the game must be better if its so popular, by gawd almighty this tutorial is beyond broken and i have no idea how to do much of anything...

Goys