The studio behind Homeworld 3, Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak, and Hardspace: Shipbreaker have cut a number of jobs, explaining this is "part of a realignment plan that's necessary because of new projects that were shelved by some of our partners". Blackbird Interactive haven't confirmed the number of people who lost their jobs, nor have they said what the mystery projects were. It's been a grim year for people working in the video games industry, with thousands losing their jobs, and we're only halfway through February.
]]>Space will neither save nor free us. Like Starfield, it will not be glamorous or exciting. As billionaire jebends plot to establish their own corporate fiefdoms amongst the stars, our descendents' potential spacelives are looking as miserable as collecting 5 spacewolf livers. But I find some hope in spaceship salvage sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker, both in the overt plot about unionisation and in the small satisfaction of doing a job well. Head down, shut up, and focus on dismantling this spaceship carefully and efficiently. It's an attitude that won't save the world but can get you through one more day, and sometimes that's enough.
]]>I've been looking back over an entire year of RPS reviews and, well, we've written a lot. Over the past twelve months, the RPS treehouse and our merry band of freelancers have reviewed 168 games in total - and that includes early access reviews, PC-port reviews, group reviews, reviews-in-progresses, and your common or garden fully-fledged reviews. 168! Damn. Even though game releases are still suffering from pandemic pushbacks, 2022 has been a busy year for games. There wasn't a huge number of big name releases - although the ones that did come out were plenty big enough - but, as always, we've had a wealth of wonderful indies releasing all year round, and we scooped up as many of them as we could.
Out of all the games we’ve given any kind of review treatment throughout the year, only a handful of them recieved RPS’s coveted Bestest Best badge; just 23, to be exact. I've gathered them all in one big round-up bundle below (there are round-ups of our favourite bits from other sections of the site, too), and they make a great collection of games. Have a scroll and click on any that take your fancy for the full review. Enjoy!
]]>With all the doors on our RPS Advent Calendar well and truly busted open for 2022 now, we thought it was high time to gather all of our favourite games of the year together in one handy location. If you've been diligently scoffing our Advent treats throughout December, then you'll already know what our game of the year picks are for 2022, but just in case you missed them or want to go through them one final time, we've got 'em all right here for you in our definitive Games Of The Year list. Enjoy!
]]>Exercise caution when opening door number 20 on the RPS Advent Calendar, because it's an uncaring world of manual labour in space out there. If you open the door wrong you could cause a huge explosion that kills you - but to mitigate that risk you can spend money buying an Official Safe Door Opener. Don't worry, you can just work more to pay it off.
]]>Against all possible odds, we're officially halfway through 2022. What a year it's been so far! After one of the busiest starts to the gaming calendar in recent memory (looking at you, Elden Ring), my backlog is barely keeping it together right now. I've started so many things on as many different services that just keeping track of what I've played when is fast becoming a second job. If you, too, have been feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of new and exciting releases coming out, then why not have a gander at this freshly compiled list of all our favourite games from the year so far? Maybe you'll find something that will similarly catch your eye, just as it's done ours. I'll warn you now, though. It's a big list.
]]>Friends and loved ones will agree, I have big “background character” energy. If I lived in the Star Wars universe, I wouldn’t be a Jedi or a Sith inquisitor. I wouldn’t even be one of those rebels who wear the long funny bike helmets. There would be no “Liam: A Star Wars Story” premiering on Disney+. Instead, I'd be the guy who changes the bedding at a grungy BnB on Tatooine. I would spend my days just sort of vibing on the fringes of all the excitement, blissfully unaware of the very important adventures occurring in a galaxy very-very-close-actually.
Maybe this is why Hardspace: Shipbreaker appeals to me so much. As a cutter, a nameless employee of the LYNX Corporation, you’re about as important to this particular vision of the future as the lad who polishes the floors on the Death Star. You are a nobody. But Shipbreaker relishes in how much that still makes you somebody.
]]>Hardspace: Shipbreaker was one of our favourite games from 2020, and after several years in early access it has now reached 1.0. Today saw the release of the spaceship salvage sim's third and final act, along with a full game re-balance and hundreds of bug fixes.
]]>Game Pass is particularly ideal for two kinds of games: indie games you're not sure you'll like enough to commit to the upfront cost, and decent-not-great blockbusters you know almost certainly aren't worth the cost but would quite like to play for at least a bit.
There are plenty of games that fit into both of these categories joining the subscription service before the end of May, including Vampire Survivors, Hardspace: Shipbreaker, Sniper Elite 5 and Jurassic World Evolution 2.
]]>The excellent ship-dissecting salvage game Hardspace: Shipbreaker will hit version 1.0 and launch out of early access on the 24th of May, the makers announced today. And oooh it'll come to Game Pass the same day. It has been a cracking game even in early access, a satisfying first-person simulation of carefully cutting up junk spaceships with industrial lasers for maximum profit and minimum workplace injury.
]]>Pop your head round the door of a Hardspace: Shipbreaker planning meeting and, according to Blackbird Interactive communications lead Ben Kuchera, you might hear somebody ask: “is that a Blackbird thing, or is it a Lynx thing?” Lynx are Hardspace's overall antagonist, and your employer - an orbital salvaging corporation that essentially enslaves workers by saddling them with a billion-credit on-boarding debt, taking the copyright on your DNA for good measure.
]]>Blackbird Interactive, the makers of Homeworld 3 and Hardspace: Shipbreaker, have announced plans to switch to a four-day work week for all employees. They join a small but growing number of game studios aiming to actively combat burnout by giving employees more time to themselves. Like many others who've tried a four-day week, they say that not only were people happier, productivity was not harmed. Cool. Who's next?
]]>Splendid spaceship-dismantling sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker is winding up to leave early access this spring, with the developers saying the next major update will see the game blast off to a full launch. After entering early access in June 2020, they're getting ready to wrap up the story campaign with its final act. Who knows, maybe we'll actually make enough money from salvaging spaceships to escape our crippling debt?
]]>As if dismantling a derelict spaceship wasn't already hazardous enough, developers Blackbird Interactive have added radiation to Hardspace: Shipbreaker. The Pretty Rad update dropped this week for the sci-fi ship scrapping sim, making it so players can find and extract Radiation Filters on their looting expeditions. This is easier said than done, however, as those Filters are rather fragile, and can drop radioactive particles if you so much as bump the thing.
]]>Hardspace: Shipbreaker sits you in front of a moist gateau and hands you a cake slice, only the gateau is a stylish spaceship and the cake slice is a metal-severing laser. It's immediately compelling, as you cut into your rich dessert to extract its delicious insides without accidentally slicing a cherry. In this metaphor, the cherries are explosives.
After a while, I found its early access release got a little lonely and a little samey, but that might have changed with today's "Salvage Your Future" update. It revamps Shipbreaker's campaign and introduces four new voiced characters.
]]>Early-access spaceship slicing simulator Hardspace: Shipbreaker has fired another update into orbit. This time around you'll have yet another class of giant abandoned ship to crawl around in. To make matters both better and worse, you've got the new demotion charge tool to do it with. They're nifty remote precision charges but apparently disarming them if you change your mind can be a trick. The new Business Is Booming update is out now for all you pro shipbreakers.
]]>Boarding and ripping open space ships as a contract shipbreaker was tough enough already. Hardspace: Shipbreaker has made its salvage simulation even more difficult with the new Haunted Frontier update that adds unmanned ghost ships to the game. if you're successful, congrats, Hardspace is getting stickers as rewards that you can slap on your tools. Good freelancer, don't complain. The update is out now along with other improvements and bug fixes to the early access game.
]]>Having already laid out a crushing capitalist future where debt is insurmountable and bodies are expendable, Hardspace: Shipbreaker now plans to pit its disposable workers against each other. Weekly challenges have arrived, delivering a new ship each week for gig-work scavengers to tear apart as efficiently as possible - proving once and for all who, exactly, is the best orbital vulture around.
]]>Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about cutting up spaceships with heavy industrial tools for cash. It’s a thrill to drift in zero-G, slicing and chopping and severing hull panels, superstructures, cockpits, airlocks, partly because the way you take them apart is up to you. You know what you have to do as soon as you get into space; you just need to figure out how.
That was also the experience of developer Blackbird Interactive as it began to develop Shipbreaker and brought it to Early Access. The theme quickly crystallised, but figuring out how freeform cutting would actually work was a lot harder, setting stern technical challenges that were never really solved, posing questions about player freedom that resulted in surprising answers, and causing spaceship designers' nightmares.
]]>Halloo, gentle reader. Since we're half way through the entire year of 2020 (yet somehow it is also still March?), we decided to run down, lasso and tie up some of our favourite games from the last six months, and force them into a nice list for you.
2020 still has plenty of new PC games to come, of course, but these are the ones closest to our little hearts so far. We've got strategy, we've got card games, we've got systematic reclamation of scraped spaceships. And, since Nate Crowley is one of the contributors to this list, we've got fish. Statistically speaking, there's bound to be at least one game on here that you'll ruddy bloody love too!
]]>Superb spaceship slicing sim Hardspace: Shipbreaker has added a new difficulty option to career mode, with shift timers disabled.
The existing career mode cuts you off and forces you back to base every 15 minutes, making things too stressful and intrusive for some. You can now take all the time you want with a wreck instead. They've also made the puzzling decision to give you an infinite oxygen supply for this mode. This is all additive, so players who like the thrill of yanking out a nuclear reactor and blasting it to safety in the dying ten seconds of a shift can still blow themselves up on company time.
]]>There are many reasons you should be playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It is full of so many details that my idle thought of "I wonder if I could write five things about it" became a list of a dozen within ten minutes.
The basic idea is that you fly around disused spaceships and gradually cut them apart for scrap and salvage, in a full 3D simulation complete with deadly hazards, time and money pressure, and a soothing space banjo soundtrack. It is lovely. And after playing it regularly for over a week, I've found some less obvious reasons why it has made a home in my heart. It's the details, mostly. But what details.
]]>VINDICATION. That's what Hardspace: Shipbreaker says to me. I have hinted several times that salvage is grossly under-represented in games. And now here's a game all about it, and it as excellent as I'd hoped.
Despite being an estimate year from release, Hardspace Colon Shipbreaker already gets a lot of things right. But my favourite thing about it is one I didn't even expect to feel so good: peeling the armour off a ship.
]]>Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game about peeling open spaceships like they’re massive tin cans to reveal the abandoned detritus inside. The belongings of long departed crews hang in the darkness like deep sea fish. Cola bottles and crisp packets wander past your visor, disturbed into aimless tumbles by the change in air pressure when you popped open the airlock like a champagne cork. The only sounds are the distant thunks of the settling hull, your own breathing, and a folksy tune on steel guitar piped into your suit by your employer to improve productivity.
]]>Without good, honest workers stripping apart old spaceships, the galaxy would be much more crowded. The reason you never see Luke Skywalker run into traffic is because of the hard work done by the great tradesmen of the Milky Way. If you've always been more interested in carefully dismantling spaceships rather than flying them, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is definitely something you should check out.
]]>Of all the reasons not to release a new game during this busy notE3 period, surely the greatest is that I simply do not have time to play Hardspace: Shipbreaker right now. Launched into early access today by Homeworld 3 developers Blackbird Interactive, it's a first-person sim about carefully cutting up spaceships to sell salvage. Blackbird, do you have any idea how many showcase streams I need to watch for work this week? Outrageous. But you, reader dear, maybe you have the time to blast off.
]]>Ahead of its early access launch next week, a new vid for Hardspace: Shipbreaker details the delicate process of cutting up an industrial transport ship for salvage without accidentally blowing it up. Coming from Homeworld 3 and Deserts Of Kharak developers Blackbird Interactive, Shipbreaker is a first-person sim about the fine art of space salvage. Buy old ships, crack 'em open, strip them for parts, and try not to trash your haul. It looks pleasingly methodical.
]]>On the list of mundane tasks done in less mundane settings is Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the deconstruction simulation that turns you into an industrial space worker trying not to get crushed by either flying ship parts or debt. Blackbird Interactive have shared a new video all about chopping up these monstrous ships and heck it looks pretty neat.
]]>Video games are great at transporting us to different worlds, but none capture that feeling quite so perfectly as intergalactic space games - and 2023 looks set to be one of the biggest years for space games yet, with the launch of Starfield, Homeworld 3 and more all on the horizon. But what games have gone before them and staked their claim already on the dusty planet surface known as 'Best Space Games'? We reveal all below, with our carefully curated list of all the best space games you can play on PC right now. Whether you're a budding space cruiser captain, a wannabe space conqueror or an intrepid space-faring explorer, there's a space game for you.
]]>Blackbird Interactive, the makers of Homeworld: Deserts Of Kharak and the upcoming Homeworld 3, today announced another game they have on the go. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a first-person salvager that will send us into spaceships to carve them up so we can sell the parts for scrap. I thought it sounded like nice, careful, methodical destruction until I saw hazards like fires, engine cores, and our old friend, explosive decompression. Have a look in the announcement trailer below.
]]>A few months into 2024 and we've got some stonking new games out already, all the better to add to our list of the best PC games to play right now. The trends right now are towards bombastic action adventures and puzzle games, but as we look to the future of 2024 we can see some roguelikes, deckbuilders and more strategy on the horizon. Still, whatever you're looking forwards to, you'll find something to enjoy on this list of the top of the top, the best of the best PC games out now..
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