Do not get this game. It is like smoking. Giving up is hard, but at least one can warn others not to start.

It is a constant struggle between the amazement and joy of things going right and the infuriation and tedium with things going wrong or things not working or existing at all. You will both love and hate the game. Love for what it is, and hate for what it ought to have, but doesn't. (And with that I don't mean liquid water. Or a console port, for that matter.) Or what it could be.

It is an old game that can't possibly have ever honestly been intended to be an actual product. It is one of Keen's usual abandonware children with, for once, a little less abandonment than usual, likely because, against all odds, it managed to gather enough of a critical mass in player-hours to not fade into obscurity fast enough. All this game continues to get is a bolting-on of "features" that, at best, expand the game sideways, but never truly forwards, and a fix of the most pressing, but not always also pressed-for, bugs. (Though, no blame on those who actually fix those bugs and test the fixes. After all, there are only so many hours in a workday and eyes in a team.) SE is, and always will be, a sort-of-playable agglomeration of tech demos. An Early-Access game without the Early-Access flag. Instead of a truly continued improval, effectively all you get, and continue to get, is more things (usually little more than band-aids with pretty pictures on them) that can (and tend to) go wrong.

Nothing appears to be done to address fundamental flaws like dodgy, laggy net code, physics that mostly work, but when they stop working, they usually stop working catastrophically, and the general UI which is a contrastless, wasteful, unwieldy, Fifty-Shades-Of-Pale-Blue insult to the term "user experience". Most of the true improvements come from the myriad of incredibly competent and imaginative modders that tirelessly dedicate themselves and their unpaid free time to the Sisyphean task of working around, or plugging, the game's shortcomings within the limits of the stagnated game architecture.

… as well as within the limits of the game studio's attention which sadly decided to pander to the console peasants and make the necessary compromises to get their game working on XBOX, too, splitting dev resources on an ungrateful target audience with an overinflated sense of entitlement, and leaving the main game on little more than life support. And then there's their other thing, GoodAI, which can't possibly run on air and good will, either. At best, one can only get the impression that SE is Keen's pet project they continue to milk with DLC just barely shiny enough, and just barely cheap enough, for enough players to continue to let the sunk-cost fallacy get the better of them and their wallets.

Don't get me wrong, SE does have its moments. It is highly accessible in terms of moddability. Practically all of its resource files are plaintext XML. You can even look at its source code. And in-game, it can look incredibly beautiful at times (if you can look, or mod, past the Keen Pee(n) Sheen, the weird greenish tint that everything seems to be coated in for no reason, or past the idiotic spotlight haze (in vacuum no less), among other things), and it is quite a capable sandbox playground.

But remember that the installations on this playground are rusty and splintered. The paint is chipping, the sand is dirty and full of pebbles, rocks, leaves, buried pets, and cigarette butts. Its maintenance crew is understaffed, underequipped, and usually busy with something else, and the playground itself is located downwind of a sewage treatment facility. If you grew up in the Khrushchyovkas this playground belongs to, spending your precious space-engineering youth with squatting on multi-point-connected subgrids made from blocks painted in garish bathroom-tile skins and adorned with stupid bars along the edges, crumbling semechki shells into collectors and refining them back into iron ingots, all while blaring Kevin McLeod's Spazzmatic Polka from the jukebox block, then yes, I guess you couldn't help but count it as part of your home, but if you're new to the block, visiting, even thinking of moving here, it's a place you had better avoid for your own health and sanity.

Welcome to Spacengistan. Run while you can. Or don't, and partake in a deceptively insidious experience of block-and-voxel-based satisfaction and punishment, racking up gameplay hours faster than considered healthy in any walk of life. Be prepared to spew worms and maggots if you do succumb to the hypnotising fragrance of the forbidden fruit and take a bite. Don't say I didn't warn you.