So, Space Engineers. It's an unfinished (Early Access/Alpha) game that is out. It's pretty expensive (19 euro), so when I looked at the picture of it, I wasn't really convinced into getting it. It looked pretty boring. But then I looked at the trailer: [YOUTUBE]?v=Bb45PD5FGQA[/YOUTUBE] If you look at the ending of the video, the physics or destruction looks very promising and impressive. So my friend and I decided to give it a go. To begin with, we just drove around with pre-built spaceships and rammed each other or mounted guns to them and had space battles. It was fun for a while, but then again, we hadn't made the ships for ourselves. That's when we decided to make a ship together. We buildt a pretty big ship (looks like a squared version of The Enterprise from Star Trek, but hey, it works) that we couldn't get to work. :derp: We sat there and played for about 2 hours, building this ship together. When it was done, we used a long time trying to figure out how to make it work. It just simply wouldn't fly. We talked in a fancy Sci-Fi language like in Stargate, saying "Maybe we don't have enough power, we need more Reactor Cores so we can transfer more power to the Thrusters, since they won't work. Or maybe the Thrusters somehow aren't connected to the ship's Gyroscopes, even though they are connected to the main Control Panel". This might seem frustrating, boring and difficult. But the fact is, it's not. It was surprisingly easy to understand, it was not frustrating at all, it went surprisingly fast to build a huge spaceship, and all the while, we were having lots of fun. I went to bed at 7AM that morning, and got out of bed about an hour ago (4PM). I haven't done that more than one other time in my whole life. This game is pretty much amazing. http://www.f2p.com/space-engineers-a-new-sandbox-game-is-coming/
It's an interesting enough game, but it's a sandbox. You have to generate your own content and it gets boring after a while.
It probably does get boring after a while, but I think it's worth the money for the time that it's not boring. You do gain knowledge and skill in building, and eventually build ships that look better, work better, and are more conveniently designed.
The point is there is no long term goal other than "I've build the most amazing spaceship 1:1 replica so far" circlejerk. They will most likely add some semblance of a storyline like Minecraft eventually did. Building 50 foot tall golden cock and balls was pretty much the only thing to do there otherwise.
But the whole point is that there's not much of a preset long-term goal, it's a whole bunch of tools, you deciding on something you want to do with them, and the highlight being the crazy journey along the way there. I've lost interest in playing Minecraft for quite a while, but I definitely had plenty of fun messing around on various multiplayer servers for a few years. As for the game here, I mean...it's obviously just an attempt to blatantly copy/formulize a game that was really successful. But at least they're doing so by trying to make a sandbox game that revolves around creativity instead of, say, a console FPS set in a modern military setting. With killstreaks.
