I saw the trailer for Shipbreaker and I thought it was going to be a puzzle sim type game where you break down space ships, which it is. What I wasn't expecting is that it was a nod to capitalist extremism and worker exploitation.

The entire premise is that the world (and human controlled space) is solely owned and controlled by one mega corp, and you lucky Earthdweller get to go work for them to pay off your massive debts. In space. In a super dangerous ship breaking job. Literally, if you see videos of people breaking down cruise ships, its the closest thing you can come to in a video game probably for inhumane, deplorable treatment of people.

So you gotta have some smarts as to now blow yourself up, electrocute yourself, crush yourself, get sucked into a furnace, etc. Hence the methodical, puzzle type dismantle of the ships. You have to carefully strip them apart and properly recycle the bits and pieces into three different "bins" depending on their category. But be fast, you only have 15 minute shifts. Time is money at Lynx!

Look, I get what the designers were trying to get at with the anti-capitalist stuff, but I am starting to get tired of that in my video games. It seems to be the common theme "capitalism controls us now! have fun in your shithole!" which is getting really boring (COUGH "OUTER WORLDS" COUGH). I wanted to just break ships, (which to be fair you CAN do) without all the extra narrative about our corporate overlords. You have to do things like go back and buy oxygen and fuel frequently during your shift. You can salvage these things off later models to stay harvesting, and that is part of time management, but its not an easy thing to manage when you want a chill breaking experience.

The controls also felt hard to get used to. Because its in space and zero gravity you thrust around with your jetpack and have to start/stop with it going different ways. Also, if something is heavier than you, it will push you away when you are trying to toss it. This can leave you very disoriented, having to roll back into position, adjust your camera, trying to focus... The developers put a lot of consideration into how you would move in space. I can appreciate that, but its not something I enjoyed.

If this sounds up your alley, there is a pretty good game here, it just wasn't really for me. There is a full campaign to get through, and realistically if you get good, pay off your billions (trillions?) of dollars of debt which would be pretty satisfying.

Just got all achievements on this game. This is probably the most I have been into a simulator type game! It has flaws but it's a great simulation game where to take apart ships to salvage them.

The gameplay loop is very satisfying, and the physics system is very nice. You consistently get new upgrades to your tools such as your laser cutter, grapple tool, tethers, demolitions, etc. It becomes a puzzle of how to dismantle the ship most effectively as you face larger and more dangerous ships. That is the most satisfying part, when you figure out the ship, find the weak points, extract the reactor and other dangerous components and salvage it perfectly. May say the controls are complex, which they are, you are in zero G, but I found the controls to be very effective once you get the hang of things, and the zero g physics are part of the satisfaction of the game.

The only negative of the game is the story. I appreciate a sci-fi dystopia anti-corporation type story however t's just not all that well-written and the voice acting isn't the best. The environmental story telling is better than what's spoken and probably should have been relied on more. There are a few later missions that are more decent than the rest of the story. That said, the story isn't the main focus for a simulation game, but the dialog is unskippable. This would be fine if the dialog only occurred in voice overs on comms as you work. However, you so often get into unskippable dialog scenes in your habitat where you must listen to the exposition before you can continue. A quality of life feature to skip dialog and cutscenes would do wonders to fix this issue.

This IP was just picked up by another developer. I hope to see more of this type of game or universe in future!!!

First off, the story is godawful. The writing is laughable, especially when it comes to the unflattering-caricature-of-people-I-disagree-with saturday-morning-cartoon-cacklingly-evil villain (both of them) and the hilariously stupid ending (both of them). Honestly, I could devote a few thousand words to the specifics of how bizarrely horrendous this aspect turned out to be, but I don't have to, because fortunately it's pretty easy to forget about it once you get into the actual meat of the game.

While I didn't seek this game out on my own, but rather got it seriously marked down as one of the random Humble Monthly offerings (a fact I am pretty thankful for), there's a non-zero chance that I might have eventually done so otherwise, as on the surface the game falls into the "mundane job simulator" sphere which I am a modest aficionado of. In the case of this game, you're placed in charge of taking decommissioned spaceships apart and properly salvaging their parts and contents. This starts out pretty simple, from just deciding whether something needs to be smelted or processed, to handling more delicate objects which you can also strip for parts to try and repair a smaller spaceship you're given, to following specific procedures for salvaging dangerous parts like electrical panels, radiation filters, fuel tanks and nuclear reactors without wrecking everything in the process.

While it does get more complicated, it's really not very long before you hit the limit of how much variety there is. One aspect I admittedly didn't end up experiencing during my playthrough is the time limit for each shift (turns out it requires a separate save file from the open shift mode I picked on a whim at the start), while another I experienced only partially was the oxygen drain mechanic, which can be enabled or disabled whenever you load a file on open shift. This may have skewed my playtime to some degree, since fully salvaging just one ship takes quite a long while, usually between 1.5 to 2 hours for me, even if there predictably exist speedrun strats which have gained meme status among the game's community such as finding a way to shove the entire ship into the barge. You can also raise your rank depending on how well you do with each ship, but from what I could gather the story progression is mostly dependent on the number of shifts, not the amount of ships gone through. The inflated playtime I ended up with before reaching the end of the game can probably be attributed to this, though I will say that by the time I reached the endgame level I had already fully upgraded all my equipment and gotten to the point where each run felt clunky and tedious. The soundtrack is pretty okay, I guess. Has a Borderlands/Firefly neo-old west style to it.

If you find yourself able to get your hands on this game for nothing or dirt-cheap, I'd say give it a try for a bit if just to get familiar with some of the community memes. Otherwise, I dunno if I could really recommend it, let alone giving the time commitment necessary to see the end of the aforementioned painfully dumb story.