Hardspace: Shipbreaker

The 24th Century. Powerful mega-corporations send under-resourced workers into orbit to break up old starships and recycle them. It's gruelling, dangerous work but Lynx Corporation is happy to provide workers with equipment and even clone bodies to download into if they die on the job...for a fee, of course. New workers start more than a billion dollars in debt and have to drive down the debt through hard, risky labour. However, there may be another way of dealing with Lynx's ruthless profiteering.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the latest game in the growing "disassembly" genre. For the last decade or so, there's been a boom in games that allow you to build things, like Minecraft and Fallout 4's settlement building mode. But we've also had games that give you the ability to dismantle things. Teardown is a good example of that and, on a different scale, so is Unpacking. This is the first game where you get to dismantle spaceships, which is inherently cool.

It also helps that the game is made by Blackbird Interactive, the same team (as Blackbird and earlier at Relic) who made the Homeworld series of video games, which have some of the most incredibly-designed spacecraft ever seen in gaming. That skill carries over into Hardspace, with the spacecraft looking like they've come straight from the covers of 1970s and 1980s SF novels with artwork by the likes of Chris Foss and Peter Elson.

To start with, the ships you have to take apart are simple. They are unpowered and depressurised, so you can just pop the cockpit canopy or an airlock and start slicing them up quickly. Ship components and contents are divided into three categories: disposable items that get burned in the furnace, recyclable items that get sent into the processor and contents that can be used again as-is, which go in the collection barge. You have access to a gravity gun-like manipulation device which you can yeet things around with, and a laser cutter which you can use to cut connecting points or just slice things apart.

As the game continues you rapidly acquire more tools: tethers allow you to move large ship components that are too big for your manipulator, whilst demolition charges shatter ship hardpoints that your laser can't touch. However, ships get bigger and more complicated. A pressurised ship means you have to find a way of venting the atmosphere safely without destroying the contents (or yourself). A powered ship means safely removing the reactor without it going critical, and a ship with active fuel tanks means shutting down the flow of fuel through pipes (unless you want to blow the ship to smithereens with an ill-placed laser cut). Later ships may have still-active and dangerously-demented AI systems who do not appreciate being cut to pieces, or coolant systems that can freeze you solid if you are too cavalier with health and safety.

There are four ship classes, each with a huge number of modified variants, usually between cargo, passenger and research variants. Some ships are easy to start breaking apart from the outside in, like peeling a large metal banana that can travel at thousands of kilometres per second. Other ships are fiendish puzzle boxes that might explode if you set a foot wrong, requiring you to get into their depths and start carefully working your way outwards. 100%ing a ship with no losses is an amazing feeling, but the game is somewhat forgiving; blowing a ship apart accidentally is frustrating, but you can usually salvage enough debris to turn a profit.

On top of the simple act of demolishing ships, there's a strong storyline that permeates through the game in the form of video calls, emails and stern warnings from head office. The work you are doing is very dangerous and the company has complete call on your services. Fellow workers upset with this position have called for unionisation, alarming the company enough to send union-busters and new bosses to try to intimated people into staying in line. You have control over this storyline, since you can choose to join the union or keep your head down and keep working (you can even join the union and then sabotage it by refusing to join in strike action or keeping working properly instead of upsetting the union's plans).

The narrative is not a huge amount of the game, turning up in odd voiceovers here and there, but it does feel timely with both the video game industry and many industries globally seeing a resurgence in labour rights debates and questions, with unions becoming a stronger force then they have been for some decades. It's unusual to see a game being so topical and raising questions worthy of debate.

But ultimately the game is about dismantling spaceships and it does that brilliantly. 3D movement in the vacuum of space, sending chunks of hull hurtling into the correct receptacle and correctly detonating a dozen charges in a way that breaks a ship apart just right are all satisfying. The UI is excellent, controls are responsive and solving a tricky puzzle in how to get a ship to break apart without exploding is immensely gratifying.

Problems do exist. Some controls feel like they could be spread out more: yeeting objects away from you with the gravity gun should be its own control rather than shared with breaking an object to ransack it for spare parts, as it's too easy to destroy an item you want to dispose of and too easy to dispose of an item you want to salvage. Tool modes can also change when you're not using them, meaning it's very easy to use the laser cutter's "wide beam" mode rather than its scalpel mode, sometimes with catastrophic results. Removing every last couch, computer terminal and light fitting from the larger ships can also start to feel like real work rather than fun, although clever cutters can come up with ingenious ways of dismantling ships around their furniture so it can be disposed of quickly and easily. The 15-minute shifts also feel a little restrictive after a while and some sort of overtime mode or upgrade extending them to 30 minutes could be a really good idea.

The problems are mostly minor and are overcome with experience. Hardspace: Shipbreaker (****½) is a superb game which has a great new idea and executes it extremely well. It is available now on PC and is coming to Xbox and PlayStation in the near future.

HARDSPACE: SHIPBREAKER to get full release on 24 May

Blackbird Interactive has confirmed their spaceship-dismantling game Hardspace: Shipbreaker will get its full release on 24 May this year. This game has been in Early Access since June 2020 and attracted considerable acclaim since then.

The game is played from a first-person perspective and sees the player take on the role of a shipbreaker working for Lynx Corporation. The player must salvage useful materials from derelict and decommissioned spacecraft to pay back the massive corporate debt they owe Lynx at the start of the game. They have various tools to break open the derelict ships, but also must be wary of hazards such as oxygen and fuel tanks, which can explode if the shipbreaking is not done carefully, as well as explosive decompression. However, players must also balance the needs to do their jobs carefully with a need for speed to keep their debt ticking down at a steady rate. Players must also manage their own resources, such as oxygen and thruster pack fuel.

The full release will include a story mode where the player discovers new information about the corporation and the ships they are dismantling as they progress, and become embroiled in a conflict between the company and a union which is trying to get better conditions for their workers.

Blackbird Interactive derived the game from their original plans for Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak (2016). Earlier in development, before reacquiring the Homeworld IP (many of the team worked on Homeworld  and Homeworld 2 at Relic Entertainment), the game was called Hardware: Shipbreakers and was set in a different universe with a much stronger focus on dismantling wrecked ships on a desert planet. After the sale of the Homeworld IP to Gearbox, Blackbird worked with them to pivot the game into the Homeworld universe, initially called Homeworld: Shipbreakers before switching the title to Deserts of Kharak.

Blackbird always liked the name and idea, and realised they could still use it in a different fashion after the idea of a "ship dismantling game" game up during an internal game jam at the studio.

The game has been warmly received during its Early Access period and its full release is certainly something to look forwards to. The game will release initially on PC via Focus Entertainment, to be followed by Xbox and PlayStation versions at a later date.

In addition to Hardspace, Blackbird are also working on Homeworld 3 for Gearbox for release later this year and Crossfire: Legion for Prime Matter.

Desperados III

The Old West, 1870. Bounty hunter John Cooper is hunting down Frank, a notorious outlaw who killed his father. Frank is in bed with the DeVitt Railroad Corporation, and thus is protected by wealth and power. Cooper joins forces with a group of disparate allies who each have their own reasons for taking on these formidable enemies. They have to work together and make the most use of their skills to win the day.

Back in 2016, Mimimi Games came out nowhere to deliver Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun. A stealth tactics game built around achieving at times impossible-seeming objectives with a limited team of characters. It was unexpectedly genius and emerged as my favourite game of the year. It was a game that wore its influences pretty openly: the Commandos series from the late 1990s but, possibly even more overtly, the Desperados series from the early 2000s. Focus Interactive, who had the Desperados IP, hit on the idea of hiring Mimimi to make a prequel to those games (to not put off newcomers to the series) using the Shogun engine. It was a match made in heaven.

Fortunately, this partnership delivers in spades. Desperados III wears two hats, as an actual continuation of the Desperados series and also as a semi-sequel to Blades of the Shogun. It fulfils both objectives admirably.

The game consists of sixteen missions, each taking place on a massive (and I do mean massive) map filled with enemies. You have between 1 and 5 characters, each with their own distinctive personality and set of skills, equipment and objectives. The aim of the game is stealth: you have to reach an objective by avoiding guards. You can try to sneak past them or pick them off one-by-one. Whilst your characters are capable fighters, they are very easily overwhelmed, so the aim of the game is to keep as low a profile as possible. You can also knock guards (or well-meaning civilians who'll raise the alarm if they spot you somewhere you shouldn't be) out if the idea of mass slaughter is unpalatable, but doing so is time-consuming and you risk detection.

There is some cleverness to the game. One of your characters can whistle to lure unsuspecting guards into ambushes, or one of your female gunfighters can put on a disguise and lure enemies to their doom, but more disciplined enemies will ignore such distractions, forcing you to be more creative in how you handle the situation. An optional mode allows you to pause the game to set up actions for your characters to execute simultaneously, a good way of taking out two guards who are permanently in each other's field of view.

Desperados III adds guns to the Blades of the Shogun mix and encourages a somewhat more aggressive style of play throughout. Each gun as a noise area which will alert guards in that zone, so you can be surprisingly aggressive in taking on enemies as long as you are also careful of what the consequences might be. Your sniper character - Dr. McCoy - is decidedly powerful in taking out enemies on watchtowers (whose disappearances tend to be easily missed by their comrades), but he is limited by ammo.

The decidedly semi-realistic tone of the game takes a turn for the weird just before the halfway mark when you recruit a character who can use actual voodoo magic, including seizing control of an enemy's mind or "linking" two characters together so whatever happens to one, happens to both. This feels a bit weird (and even overpowered) when it first appears, but it later gives rise to some of the game's most inventive puzzles and challenges, so it's fair enough. Some of the moves you can pull off with Isabella (and her pet cat) will have the player giggling like a buffoon.

Desperados III succeeds through its magnificent level design, which is often jaw-dropping. It's not uncommon, especially in the back half of the game, to be confronted by a mission that appears flat-out impossible, until you find that one guard who goes out of everyone else's eyeline for a few seconds, which then causes the map to start unravelling lot a knot. Each mission is systemic rather than prescriptive, though; it's completely up to you which tactics and abilities you use to achieve each objective. There's some excellent videos of the game developers being taken by surprise by some of the solutions that players have come up with to puzzles. There's also a splendid mission post-mortem screen which takes you (fairly quickly) step-by-step through the mission you just completed, showing how it unfolded without the several dozen quicksaves and quickloads you likely went through in the process.

The story is a fairly serviceable revenge narrative, but there's some nice character beats dropped on top of that (such as grumpy McCoy's gradual, reluctant acceptance into the team). At sixteen missions taking about 35 hours to complete, the game also hits a sweet spot of not being too long whilst not outstaying its welcome. In a welcome move, the game adds a bunch of optional missions at the end of the game which take place on the existing maps, but adds new enemies and puzzles, or allows you to use characters who weren't available earlier on in the game. More of these missions will be dynamically added in free updates over the coming months.

I'm not sure if there's any flaws of note in the game. It does share Shogun's occasional confusion on what you're trying to get a character to do, such as thinking you're trying to get a character to climb a wall rather than hide in the shadows next to it, but these occasions were much reduced from the first games. Hardcore Desperados fans may also grumble about the lack of utility for horses. In the original games you can ride horses (sometimes using them to reach inaccessible ledges), release them from the stables to cause a distraction or come up with other creative ideas; in this came the only thing you can do with them is spook them to kicking someone standing next to them.

Overall, Desperados III (*****) is compelling, incredibly smart, fiendishly clever and ridiculously addictive as it forces you to overcome its challenges on each mission. It is available now on PC, PlayStation 4 and X-Box One.

WEREWOLF: THE APOCALYPSE game in development

A couple of years back Paradox Entertainment bought White Wolf, the company behind the World of Darkness, a horror setting for a family of roleplaying games, the best-known of which is Vampire: The Masquerade. It's now been announced that a new computer roleplaying game in the setting is in development, based on Vampire's sister game Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

The new game, curiously, is not being released by Paradox. It's instead being developed by Cyanide, the French studio behind Blood Bowl and the so-so 2012 Game of Thrones RPG, and being released by Focus Interactive. This makes me wonder if the development deal pre-dates White Wolf's acquisition, as there doesn't seem much logic to them doing this and not Paradox themselves.

Hopefully the new game will be good, although Cyanide's track record has been spotty. What gamers have been hoping for is a new Vampire game, especially given Paradox's alliance with Obsidian, where some of the developers of the well-received 2004 RPG Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines are now working. Time will tell whether that intriguing possibility comes to light.

New BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC gameplay trailer

Focus Home Interactive have released a new trailer for their upcoming Warhammer 40,000 space strategy game, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada. This trailer shows what the game actually looks like when you are playing it.

It's looking good, with some solid implementation of strategy and making sure that movement and facing is important. However, the lack of actual 3D movement is a big minus for the game that it's going to have to work hard to overcome.

Battlefleet Gothic: Armada will be released on PC in 2016.

BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC: ARMADA trailer

Focus Home Interactive has released a teaser trailer for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, a strategy game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe focusing on space combat.

No release date has been set so far, but the game is expected in 2016 (although hopefully it might just sneak in at the end of this year).

More on BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC

Rock Paper Shotgun have some more info on the upcoming Battlefleet Gothic: Armada game.

Briefly, the game will depict the struggle for the Gothic system. The game starts with the Imperium controlling the entire system and struggling against invading Eldar, Ork and Chaos forces. The game is dynamic, with fleets and ships being built and moved on a turn-based battle map before the game turns into a real-time tactical mode. The single-player campaign will only feature the Imperium as a controllable faction, but there will be skirmish and multiplayer mods featuring the other races. The game will also feature the ability to level entire planets from orbit (the dreaded "Exterminatus" order) and the AI of ship captains will develop, possibly leading them to rebel if you don't handle them right.

More info here.

BATTLEFLEET GOTHIC video game announced

Focus Interactive have announced they are working on a Battlefleet Gothic real-time strategy game, subtitled Armada. Set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, Battlefleet Gothic pitches the starships, warships and massive star cruisers from the various factions against one another. The original miniatures game was very popular and there have been calls for a computer game version for years.

 
The board game line was suspended two years ago, leading to speculation that Games Workshop was putting the sub-franchise to one side. The video game news suggests it may have a future after all. The new game is being made by the same team behind the well-received Stellar Impact. No release date has been set, but Focus are pretty good at not announcing games until they are reasonably close to release, so a late 2015 release may be possible.

In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, the starships fielded by the major races are huge, with the largest Imperial battleships exceeding 8km in length. Armada will initially depict ships from the Imperium, Orks, Eldar and Chaos factions, although if successful I imagine others will follow.