I'm very tentative about the game. There's issues, and there's the fun bits.

I like that you can deconstruct ships, and can get creative with how you do so. Its a very unique type of game that lets you feel like you're accomplishing something the faster you can go without screwing up.

However, there are several things that almost make me want to say no to the game's recommendation. Now, just cause I have a list of negatives that I'm going to provide thats longer than the above positive, doesn't make the game bad. I just want you to be aware of what you're going to experience while playing.

The game has 4 modes of play, all of which are separate entity save files so your progress in any one of them is completely separate. AKA, scanning for hard drives is useless if you plan to start a new file because you'll end up scanning the same drives all over again. Add to that, you can't combine features of certain modes, in my case I want one death mode, with no shift timers. I would rather have a profit per minute graph or something after my shift in that case.

If you beat the game in any mode, and restart to play a different difficulty or to try something different, maybe try to beat it faster, you will be forced to listen to every single dialog, even the meaningless useless ones that don't add anything to the story, most notably Lou who wants to whine and talk about her feelings constantly, locking you from going to end your shift till you listen to her annoying rants. Even if you've seen these dialogs before, you cannot skip them at all, and there's a lot of them. What the devs should have done is add these dialogs to your shift, so you can listen while working, based on the current danger level which they already have a calculation for which changes the music.

A large portion of the community into speed running and such, appears to play by using what I call exploits, and they just call game design because the devs haven't got a way to remove those features and said they won't. There are several exploits in the game, including ship dunking and pressurization hacks that let you speed things up in various ways. This isn't all of them as I don't know all of the cheese tactics these people use. The devs have said they won't fix certain things from what I hear, because they either can't, or the players like it.

There are several pressurization issues that don't make any sense, and have no logic to them. The game effectively forces you to do dangerous methods of depressurization, on purpose, and its required late game to explosively decompress your ships a very large portion of the time. The pressurization system I feel was handled very, very, badly. Admittedly, there are some reasons why they couldn't do certain things to make it better, but, there are also things they could have done to improve it.

Lastly, its worth noting that there's a woke vibe to the game. Its not bad enough for me to dislike it over, but it is slightly annoying if you think about it too closely. Lou, the POC lesbian girl who is smarter than all of the team and is an activist, and the dumb white male on the team who constantly screws up. I'm only talking about the team members who actually do work, not the guy who sits there watching you all giving you training and such. And then there's the fat white male who's evil and stuff. Its just a set of odd woke vibes I get from the game, like they wanted to promote current day woke-ness in some way or perhaps its required in order to win an award (which it is now days, you literally can't win an award if you don't check certain woke flags..) but eh, it only bothers me to some extent.

Once you actually get through the story, it can be entirely ignored though, and the game its self is fun after that as there are no more unskippable dialogs and no more bad white man shouting at you all or the constant reminder that the only other white male on the team is a screwup. The remaining occasional dialogs are actually kinda nice to listen to and can be done while playing rather than waiting for the shift to end so you can start the next. The gameplay, is great. I like it. If you play the right way, it can be interesting. If you're a speed runner and you don't care about breaking the rules, you can ship dunk and all that with no penalties. If you wanna play by the rules, it gets significantly harder to speed run. I think my highest income might have been 15 million in a shift.

I mainly wished to express the negatives, in the hopes that the devs read these reviews because I've expressed many things in the discord with not much comment on them, even during early access. All in all, even with the above negatives, I do like the game, though I may not end up playing anymore cause there's just no new ships, and modding barely exists, so the replay value is gone. If the game had a ship builder in it, used steam workshop, and had a better modding platform, its replay value would skyrocket. Perhaps for Shipbreaker 2 eh?

I'm very tentative about the game. There's issues, and there's the fun bits. I like that you can deconstruct ships, and can get creative with how you do so. Its a very unique type of game that lets you feel like you're accomplishing something the faster you can go without screwing up. However, there are several things that almost make me want to say no to the game's recommendation. Now, just cause I have a list of negatives that I'm going to provide thats longer than the above positive, doesn't make the game bad. I just want you to be aware of what you're going to experience while playing. The game has 4 modes of play, all of which are separate entity save files so your progress in any one of them is completely separate. AKA, scanning for hard drives is useless if you plan to start a new file because you'll end up scanning the same drives all over again. Add to that, you can't combine features of certain modes, in my case I want one death mode, with no shift timers. I would rather have a profit per minute graph or something after my shift in that case. If you beat the game in any mode, and restart to play a different difficulty or to try something different, maybe try to beat it faster, you will be forced to listen to every single dialog, even the meaningless useless ones that don't add anything to the story, most notably Lou who wants to whine and talk about her feelings constantly, locking you from going to end your shift till you listen to her annoying rants. Even if you've seen these dialogs before, you cannot skip them at all, and there's a lot of them. What the devs should have done is add these dialogs to your shift, so you can listen while working, based on the current danger level which they already have a calculation for which changes the music. A large portion of the community into speed running and such, appears to play by using what I call exploits, and they just call game design because the devs haven't got a way to remove those features and said they won't. There are several exploits in the game, including ship dunking and pressurization hacks that let you speed things up in various ways. This isn't all of them as I don't know all of the cheese tactics these people use. The devs have said they won't fix certain things from what I hear, because they either can't, or the players like it. There are several pressurization issues that don't make any sense, and have no logic to them. The game effectively forces you to do dangerous methods of depressurization, on purpose, and its required late game to explosively decompress your ships a very large portion of the time. The pressurization system I feel was handled very, very, badly. Admittedly, there are some reasons why they couldn't do certain things to make it better, but, there are also things they could have done to improve it. Lastly, its worth noting that there's a woke vibe to the game. Its not bad enough for me to dislike it over, but it is slightly annoying if you think about it too closely. Lou, the POC lesbian girl who is smarter than all of the team and is an activist, and the dumb white male on the team who constantly screws up. I'm only talking about the team members who actually do work, not the guy who sits there watching you all giving you training and such. And then there's the fat white male who's evil and stuff. Its just a set of odd woke vibes I get from the game, like they wanted to promote current day woke-ness in some way or perhaps its required in order to win an award (which it is now days, you literally can't win an award if you don't check certain woke flags..) but eh, it only bothers me to some extent. Once you actually get through the story, it can be entirely ignored though, and the game its self is fun after that as there are no more unskippable dialogs and no more bad white man shouting at you all or the constant reminder that the only other white male on the team is a screwup. The remaining occasional dialogs are actually kinda nice to listen to and can be done while playing rather than waiting for the shift to end so you can start the next. The gameplay, is great. I like it. If you play the right way, it can be interesting. If you're a speed runner and you don't care about breaking the rules, you can ship dunk and all that with no penalties. If you wanna play by the rules, it gets significantly harder to speed run. I think my highest income might have been 15 million in a shift. I mainly wished to express the negatives, in the hopes that the devs read these reviews because I've expressed many things in the discord with not much comment on them, even during early access. All in all, even with the above negatives, I do like the game, though I may not end up playing anymore cause there's just no new ships, and modding barely exists, so the replay value is gone. If the game had a ship builder in it, used steam workshop, and had a better modding platform, its replay value would skyrocket. Perhaps for Shipbreaker 2 eh?