This would be a great game if the devs actually cared to do any work on it, updating or even making DLC for it, or maybe even a sequel. Literally any content. As it stands there is very little ship variety, not nearly enough to call this a "full release" game. The last significant update was in November of 2022, the modding community is dead because there is basically no support for it, so you can't even get new variety that way.

I have 200 hours so obviously I enjoyed the game, but i got it in early access and was holding onto the hope that the developer would make significant improvements to the game. They did manage to add a few ships and an actual "story", but most people in the community dislike the new story anyway because it is slow and unskippable. Plus once you get to end game there really is no end game content or new game plus.

Shipbreaker is the perfect example of a game where they listened to the audience a little too much and lost the magic of the original experience, and while in it's current state I don't think the product is bad and I still thouroughly recommend it, I think a lot was lost in the gentrification of the product to try to meet widespread appeal. Appeal to people who already enjoyed the product or they never would have played it in the first place, and were just complaining for their individual issues. After all of this pandering, pretty much no one in their community is willing to vote for them in awards because they don't respect them.

I think the easiest way to put this into perspective is to describe what Shipbreaker WAS, and then work backwards to what it currently is. Shipbreaker was a quiet, contemplative work simulator about being a cog in an impossibly large machine. A dystopian future where debt slaves are forced into highly dangerous situations at great expense to themselves in order to desperately scratch away at a debt imposed to them by the corporation. The dialogue they added to the game later on actually directly references these Golden Years of Shipbreaking. It was a title that didn't really have an end and had a goal that was so impossibly high that it was unachievable to most people, so of course someone sat there for 2 months playing 18 hours a day so they could be the first to do it. I believe this would be a portent of things to come.

As a complete product and in it's current state, Shipbreaker is a libertarian power fantasy the devolves into you destroying property which magically fixes the government and all of earth. The story became completely derivative and infantile as they continued to listen to those people who were just there to tick off achievements and then leave. The antagonist is so impossibly and cartoonishly evil and there is no longer the grey area of being a regular human in a hyper capitalist machine and all of the side characters carry on like they're resistance fighters from a terminator movie and not human beings with lives, jobs and ambitions. None of the freedom fighter characters have any personality flaws and they're all depicted as infallible saints. It's quite possibly the cringiest ♥♥♥♥ you'll ever have to sit through in your entire life.

BUT story in a game is like story in a porno and if you focus on that, you're just consuming it wrong. If you mute all the voices, skip all the story beats and just live in this dark, desolate place where there is no escape, and all you can do is chip away at a mountain with an icepick while your clones repeatedly get incinerated (at GREAT expense to yourself) to afford you the freedom to learn, it's an extremely satisfying experience. Basically what they said they were selling when they released the game in early access.

For an early access product that didn't really focus on story and was popular as a work simulator with lots of little moving parts and intricacies, for the studio to then gentrify all of those elements, make the game much easier because people couldn't find keys and remove the desolation and despair just kind of seems like a slap in the face. Buy a key for 10,000 so you can salvage the 7 million dollar reactor, Jimmy. Jimmy starts to scream, froth at the mouth and say the game is bad because he's too stupid to figure out what to do.

This is a good GAME. It has excellent music that perfectly meshes with the art style and the old story, kind of sad tracks with a type of energy to them and a hope for tomorrow. Programmers, artists, everyone is doing an outstanding job, and then the story writer is just there with a crayon lodged in their nose drooling on the studio floor, babbling that their opinion that blowing ♥♥♥♥ up is the only way to fix society. Other people's stuff not their stuff obviously. This doesn't just obviously cause more bills in the hyper capitalist future, it makes the corporate psychopath that runs the company and who has been totally callous openly for their entire career suddenly decide not to do that thing. Man you blowing up that one ship out of the fifteen billion currently being worked on showed that megacorporation that is interplanetary. They felt that in their back pocket! The story is that a peasant throws turnips at a castle until the king spontaneously combusts and everything magically resolves itself, the end.

The game however? Pretty fun. You pull apart giant lego ships and try not to damage parts you're salvaging. It's a physics game where you use the gravity gun from half life to generate imaginary resources that give you serotonin. It's one of the better Gary's Mod levels, but with a budget. It's the basketball from Deus Ex except all of your implants are designed for basketball instead of shooting stuff. Can't really complain. Physics in games are great fun.

Beautiful game with that workflow feel like powerwash sim- but a great narrative and excellent space salvage gameplay. Highly recommended.

the amount of time i have spent staring at loading screens saying press _ to continue is Incredible

Indian factory simulator

Its an overall fairly relaxing game with a fun game-play loop. The "story" however is just not good. I wish I could completely mute the characters and not be forced to listen to them babble.

I've had to start over 3 times from fresh, and I don't even know why. Every time I've started the game there's no save data. I can't recommend a game that won't even successfully save my data.

Been playing this game for years, then out of nowhere it just doesn't want to launch/load into the main menu..

a fun game that is brought down by a hackneyed anti-capitalist, pro union drivel of a "story". Developers, please show me on the doll where the middle manager touched you.

Shipbreaker has really good challenges and mechanics keeping it feeling really engaging and fast paced.