Blackbird Interactive’s latest game Hardspace: Shipbreakers has now left Steam Early Access, and is out now. The game revolves around being a “cutter”, a blue-collar job in the dystopian future where you cut space ships for parts, all done in space.
There’s a lot of physics to get a handle on, like having no gravity so it’s hard to stay stationary and re-orient yourself which way is up or down, or the fact that ships can’t be cut nilly-willy or risk explosion, electrocution, nuclear reactions and other occupational safety hazards that may or may not lead to death.
Dying is fine though, you’ll be resurrected in a “spare”, but every death and mistake at work will just add more to your crippling debt that you gain from signing up for this job. And as a hardworking cutter, you should be working your way to clear all those billions of credits to your name.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker has almost all the elements of a first-person survival game, but it’s not. The single-player game with an intriguing story is not one of those.
And if you feel like you’ve heard a game of a similar-sounding title from a decade ago, it’s because it’s sort of is. Hardspace: Shipbreaker shares a name with another Blackbird Interactive game, Hardware: Shipbreakers, an RTS that was supposed to be a Homeworld spiritual successor before the devs got to use the Homeworld name, which resulted in Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak. Shipbreaker is its own IP, but it’s interesting to see the name reappear again in this form.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is out now on PC (Steam, Microsost Store). It’s also available on PC Game Pass.