I purchased and played Hardship Spacebreaker (HSB from here on out) and, well, it's fun. It's different. You are given the lascutter from Deadspace and the blue gravity gun from Garry's mod, and spat out at a ship with zero handholding. I wouldn't call the game hard, but you need to get used to the zero-g maneuvering and tool mechanics, and also become familiar with the various hull designs, in order to make a serious profit. You must pay daily interest totaling about $500k, which is coincidentally the scrap value of an undamaged class 1 reactor, which is guaranteed in every ship and not nearly as dangerous as the game makes it out to be. Sure, it's an immediate death should it explode, but that has only happened once in the 30 or so ships I've encountered so far. The resulting debris bubble was spectacular to witness, and not all that difficult to clean up.
Your cutter is not as powerful or as freeform as I first imagined, which was a realization that disappointed me. You have two modes, that work to either heat up an object to disintegration, or to slice an object vertically or horizontally. The objects you can interact with seem to be limited to pre-established anchor points, which is kind of boring to work with, or the various aluminum panels that make up the spaceship. You cannot cut into the ship from the outside (at least, not in the first 5 of 10 xp levels in the game), so you are sort of working with only a few potential places to cut. And with the limited ship variation, you end up making the same kind of cuts over and over. Which is OK, but for a 'debt simulator' style game it was kind of monotonous. Since you make loads of dosh selling complete ship components over damaged pieces, you are discouraged from cutting - at least if you plan to 'use the whole buffalo,' as one in-game character describes it. Of course, the option is there to loot and scoot - just take the reactor, engine, and maybe a few packages or consoles, and forfeit the rest. There is no cost to acquiring a new hull to scrap.
I discovered that by grabbing onto a permanent surface, like that of the space station, and left clicking, you can propel yourself at high speeds. This can save you a HUGE amount of time, but must be performed precisely. I haven't fallen into either of the scrap processors, but I'm kind of curious what happens, as there is nothing stopping you from accidentally throwing yourself into one. I imagine you could float off into the void as well, if you ran out of thruster fuel and an inopportune moment. .
Author
Topic: Blurb on Games that probably don't deserve their own threads. (Read 300539 times)