Space Engineers Review (Atbot)
TLDR: Game is very fun for a creative engineer, lacks in depth and reasoning but is held up by impressive sandbox and creative freedom.
Space Engineers is probably one of the most "sandbox" you can get within the sandbox genre, the immense amount of things you can build in this game is extremely impressive. If you are an engineer and you like designing and working on big projects this game is absolutely for you. The main selling point is the procedure of designing a ship, watching it fail horribly, going back to the drawing board, and redesigning your work. It's extremely satisfying experiencing your ship or something similar fail several times for you to finally come out with something that has overcome all your problems and pushed through. This is even further improved by adding "Programmable Blocks" into the game which you can program in Lua, a script that does almost anything.
Because of the vast sandbox this game has to offer it also comes with a small price, an extremely steep learning curve. If you're playing alone you will need a LOT of patience because your browser history will be FLOODED with "Space engineers how to...". Learning how to play is part of the fun of this game although I sometimes wish the UI was a bit better in the sense of not being so congested, there's a LOT on your screen at once at times so it can be overwhelming to a casual player.
With all that said, there are two MAJOR issues that I see in this game that I, and many others who have played this game, always eventually realize apon playing for a while.
Unfortunately, where this game shines in its creativity, its actual depth in the PURPOSE of building these feats of engineering are where the game starts to show its cracks.
There is no REASON to build a giant giga space-ship that can kill everything, there is no REASON to build a massive base that looks super cool other than it just looking super cool. The drive to progress through the game is cut short when you realize there's nothing past the objective of satisfying the drive to gather materials in the most efficient manner and building the best miner ship or building one big fighter ship that can pretty much kill whatever you want. The time at which you are "evenly matched" against an enemy is an extremely thin section of the game as you will fight a few enemies, redesign your ship or build a new one, and after 2-3 iterations of designing you will have a ship that can defeat any enemy. The game doesn't push you, you are either out-matched, or you will kill the enemy ship without really any trouble. These objectives will keep you busy and are genuinely fun for a creative person who is willing to spend time to create, fail, redesign, and create again, but you will ALWAYS return to the same spot in the end; why? Why should I do any of this if afterwords there's nothing to push further? The reasons to do these things would be solved if it weren't for the lack of:
Depth. There are many factions you can interact with in the game, and to use the word "interact" is used loosely as there are no npc's in this game whatsoever. No other "human" characters you can talk to, this leaves the game feeling empty and lifeless. There is a meter that keeps track of your relationship status with every faction, if you do "bad" things it'll go down, but the worst thing that can happen is that they attack you when they see you, that's it, you can steal and destroy every faction and there will be pretty much no consequences for it. On the other hand if you do missions and destroy pirates you can become friendly with the faction, this also has almost no purpose as well, you don't gain anything from creating friends, so whats the point? You will get up to 10% increased buying and selling power with that faction, how exciting. Why should I grind missions for hours and hours on end to increase my reputation with one faction, when I can just steal one of their ships, scrap it, and gain a TON of resources in a small amount of time.
Mods in this game are really the only thing that's holding this game a-float. These mods fix quite a few minor issues that the devs have overlooked, and even fix some major issues that I've mentioned previously such as the no goal, no reason, and similar things in that area. This is only a minor fix to these issues because of the disconnect between mods and the actual game, which is usually how mods end up being in any game. Mods add variety in new game-play, goals, and activities to do but they are MODS, they are going to feel different and alien to the base game. These mods can only do so much, the cracks in the game are still very much there, putting a band-aid on a broken window doesn't fix the issue.
Lastly I want to say is that the things that I've mentioned above are pretty much common knowledge at this point, the entire community can agree on most of the things that I've said. The developers of the game haven't released a substantial update in a long time, they release a lot of small updates here and there but usually are DLC's and cosmetic blocks. I would like to see the devs listen to the community more in the future.