"Hardspace: Shipbreaker" - The most dangerous job in the galaxy

This is an article from our content partner "PC Games". Here you can find the original article by author David Benke.

A one with nine zeros, ten thousand times one hundred thousand, or quite simply: a tidy pile of dough. That's how deep in the hole you are at the beginning of Hardspace: Shipbreaker. And for the next 100 hours of gameplay, it's your job to work off this sum with your creditors - in sweaty, grueling drudgery. Sounds like a lot of fun, doesn't it?

Now, of course, you might say, "Hey, I already spend my days going to work, earning money, and getting out of the red. I don't need that in gaming form after hours, too!" But the developers from Blackbird Interactive (known for their RTS series Homeworld) package the endless race in the capitalistic hamster wheel in such an appealing way that we didn't want to put mouse and keyboard aside during the test. You're not sitting at the supermarket checkout, cleaning toilets or trying to pull a funny game test out of your fingers in the open-plan office. You're doing the most dangerous job in the entire universe, that of space junk collector! A job so tough it could easily fill its own series on DMAX, alongside King of Trucks and Gold Rush on the Yukon.

Cinderella in Space

"Hardspace: Shipbreaker" is set in a distant future in which large parts of the solar system have been completely industrialized and the Earth has increasingly degenerated into a galactic garbage dump. Naturally, people are needed to take care of all this junk. And that's where you come in! As the newest employee of the giant LYNX Corporation, it's your job to use cutting-edge salvage technology to break down old ships into their component parts, scavenge valuable raw materials, and then sell them for profit.

Sounds quite simple in theory, but in fact it's almost a science in itself: Before you start, you first have to analyze each wreck with the scanner to see what it's actually made of and where there are possible weak points. In the rarest of cases, a ship like this can be filleted like a Christmas goose in no time at all.

You have to work your way from the inside to the outside, use your laser to loosen welding points on the basic structure, remove the hull, cut it into its small parts, carefully remove the interior and then, depending on its condition and reusability, throw it all into the melting furnace, the recycling plant or the waiting freighter. According to the motto: the good in the potty, the bad in the jar.

In all this, you'll be helped by your trusty hand-throwing hook, a kind of high-tech lasso with which you can drag objects through space. Thanks to the built-in impact module, you can also hurl things away from you with a bang. Or you can use so-called connectors to tie several pieces of scrap together. This works very well due to the successful physics simulation!

Completely detached from the earth

At the beginning, physics is also your worst adversary. After all, you are still moving in weightlessness, so you have a 360-degree movement radius. This means that you sometimes drift wildly rotating through the vacuum, while all you really wanted to do was saber a piece of metal. Then you have to use your thrusters to bring yourself back into position. Or you hang in front of the screen with your head twisted, as if you were just trying to watch a portrait video in landscape format.

But once you've mastered the controls, which are a bit fiddly at first, "Hardspace: Shipbreaker" unfolds its very special charm and puts you into a wonderful, almost meditative flow: you float through your dock, do your thing and forget a bit about the hustle and bustle of the world around you. The scrap collecting is immensely relaxing and decelerating. The ingenious soundtrack also contributes to this, mixing guitar-heavy Americana music with futuristic synth elements and even dynamically adapting to the gameplay - for example, when you hit your head.

The seriousness of (ab)life

This idyllic harmony doesn't last forever, though, because at some point you'll come to the rude realization: That was just the relaxed tutorial up to this point! So you've had puppy protection the whole time. As soon as the training wheels are off, "Hardspace: Shipbreaker" suddenly becomes noticeably more demanding and confronts you with a steadily increasing learning curve.

For example, you'll learn that you're not allowed to fiddle around with a shipwreck indefinitely, but that you only have 15 minutes per shift to get as much work done as possible. So it's better to get to work quickly! You also have to keep an eye on your health, your suit condition and your fuel and oxygen supply at all times. Especially the breathing shortage is a bit annoying, because you need a new 0² cartridge every few minutes and have to interrupt your work for that.

You can sometimes find consumables hidden in the wreckage, but most of the time you have to fly to a nearby store terminal and buy supplies manually, at your own expense of course.

In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you get charged for almost everything, your immense debts don't come from anywhere: if you accidentally burn a piece of carbon instead of recycling it, the material value is deducted from your wages. You have to pay daily rent for your equipment.

Yes, even your own death costs cash! Then the LYNX Corporation creates a clone of you, which continues to slave for them!

Dead in Space

And this cloning process can happen really often, because the life as a shipbreaker is mostly a dangerous and short one: You crash into a steel beam with too much caracho? Dead. You were accidentally sucked in by one of the recycling machines? Dead again. You forgot to empty the fuel tank of a wrecked ship so that it blows up under your cutting torch? Well, you certainly know the answer.

At least on the standard difficulty level, your demise isn't a problem. Thanks to the EverWork body replacement program, you'll get an infinite number of new bodies. On the higher levels, however, your respawns are sometimes limited to just 30 or there is even permadeath. So if you die once, all campaign progress is gone.

Speaking of the campaign: It includes three acts, which will keep you busy for about 30 hours. In the course of the campaign, you'll try to secretly organize a union for fairer working conditions, which your bosses don't like at all, of course. Apart from a few isolated cutscenes, you will unfortunately only be told the story in emails and short conversations via radio. These are fully dubbed, but there's not much more to see than a few text boxes with associated character images at the bottom of the screen. But hey, the story is, despite a good pinch of humor and criticism of capitalism, rather secondary anyway.

Scrappage scheme

The big motivation, the carrot in front of your nose remains the black zero on your account. In order to achieve this at some point, you unlock new, more efficient tools like explosive charges during the course of the game. You can also repair existing equipment at a workbench in your modest home, decorate it with stickers or improve it. Upgrades to your laser cutter will also let you cut through tougher materials. If you upgrade your suit, you'll have a larger supply of air in a vacuum.

Any customization will cost you LYNX coins, which you get for completing certain salvage objectives and level-ups. The more ships you scrap, the more experience you gain, the higher your rank, which in turn gives you access to new equipment and ships. The space cruisers get bigger and bigger, and there are more and more dangers. If you face unstable fusion reactors, pressure differences or evil on-board AIs, you'll also collect more money in return.

By the way, you can compare your own account balance with that of other players in a global high score and see how much of the absurdly high mountain of debt they have already been able to work off. The numbers are pretty sobering, though. Even the leader in our ranking was still a good 700 million dollars in debt, so he wasn't even halfway through.

Quo vadis?

This is actually one of the few points of criticism in Hardspace: Shipbreaker: the long-term motivation. Once you've reached the maximum level of 30, unlocked all tools and all ship types, there are no good reasons to keep playing.

The goal you're working towards just seems completely unattainable. In addition, there are just 13 different ship types. They are randomly generated for each mission, but they always look relatively the same. You quickly get fed up with the uniform yellow, gray and black color scheme, which isn't the most beautiful even at the beginning - we'll leave the fancy effects for cutting torches and explosions aside.

Then the scrap collecting becomes a bit monotonous and repetitive. Alternative modes like Free Play or Cutter S.P.U.R.T., in which you can disassemble a ship as quickly as possible and share your best time with the world, don't change anything.

"Hardspace: Shipbreaker" would need something like mod support or a co-op mode. However, according to developer statements, that probably won't happen. "The complex physics simulation at the heart of our shipbreaking would require us to synchronize hundreds of physically simulated free-floating objects and their associated collision meshes between clients. That's a pretty difficult problem," it says on Steam. Or in short, the technology doesn't cooperate.

That's an incredible pity, because otherwise "Hardspace: Shipbreaker" is actually a well-rounded game. The unconventional game concept, the relaxed gameplay, the in-game physics, the great soundtrack and the clean technical implementation make the title a gaming experience that we would have loved to spend more time in.

My new dream job!

The fascination of "Hardspace: Shipbreaker" is hard to explain, some people might not even understand it. But to sail weightlessly through space and to dismantle huge spaceships with your cutting torch, while an atmospheric soundtrack of the Firefly brand is playing in the background: There's just something incredibly relaxing about that. It's like many other job simulations of the Mudrunner or Flight Simulator brand. The game experience per se isn't incredibly exciting, challenging or varied. But it's great for simply turning off your head for a few hours and distracting yourself from everyday life. Personally, I can easily overlook minor flaws like the somewhat repetitive design or the meager long-term motivation.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker was released on May 24, 2022 for the PC. On Steam, the title costs just under 35 Euros / 36.9 Swiss Francs, Game Pass users can play it for free as part of their subscription. The developers from Blackbird Interactive have also planned versions for Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S|X for the future.