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Space Engineers - A 10-Year Veteran Player's Review

I'm posting this review on my personal 10-Year Anniversary of playing Space Engineers, with 5400 hours at the time of writing this. I was originally going to make a video essay, but I think I'll save that for another time, perhaps with a deep-dive into what Space Engineers was like back in the old days.
But anyhow, I think I'm long overdue on writing at least a written review for the game that means the most to me and my childhood, and also defined the Space Building Sandbox genre as a whole.


TLDR Summary:

I can wholeheartedly recommend Space Engineers to anyone that is interested in a space-themed Minecraft/Lego Sandbox with optional survival elements and a thriving community.
It's relatively easy for someone inexperienced to get into, sandbox-y enough to give you hundreds (if not thousands) of hours of playtime (both in survival and creative mode), and complex enough to still let you discover new things and make you come back for more.
With a thriving community of builders, scripters, and modders, the possibilities are limitless - as long as you have a spark of creativity. There are some bugs and weird quirks, and the recent updates are lackluster, but the overall game is still great fun and very open-ended.

For those seeking a more extensive read, feel free to scroll further down.

Quick-fire Feature Rundown & Pros/Cons:
Pros - What makes Space Engineers great!

+ Space, and a lot of it (4.42 Trillion cubic km to be precise), with planets, moons, asteroids and random encounters.
+ Creative Mode (Open-ended Sandbox mode).
+ Survival Mode (Creative mode, but with resource gathering, manual construction, and health/oxygen/power mechanics).
+ Some action-/story-focused "campaign scenarios".
+ Mostly-stable Multiplayer, with PvE and PvP possibilities (Peer-to-Peer or Dedicated Servers).
+ Crossplay with Consoles and other platforms.
+ In-depth Building, with countless block types to create literally anything - be it spaceships, stations, bases, rovers, or even mechs.
+ Ability to apply custom colors and "skins"/textures to almost any block.
+ A large and active community for building, modding, scripting and even PvE/PvP.

Cons - The problems...

- Beginner-unfriendly UI and user experience.
- Outdated or insufficient official tutorials for core game mechanics.
- Many bugs, glitches, quirks and other unintuitive edge case problems that can lead to frustrating experiences.
- Survival Mode gets monotonous and repetitive quickly once you are past the "early-game" (Mods can help with this).
- No special points of interest to encourage exploration, both in Survival and Creative mode.
- Slow update cadence, with lackluster content and too much focus on DLC.
- Every major update adds to the ongoing DLC apocalypse (BUT, at least no P2W or Microtransactions).


A veteran player's take on Space Engineers' development:

I remember seeing the 2013 Space Engineers Alpha Trailer around January 2014, and then watched some YouTubers play it - some of them still make content for this game, even today. Space Engineers felt like a dream come true - a blend of Minecraft/LEGO Technic and Space. At its core, you can build anything you can imagine out in space or on planets/moons, all within a fully-destructible voxel environment.
After following the game for a while, on June 27th 2014, I convinced my Dad to make me a Steam account and buy me Space Engineers to play over the summer holidays.
I ended up playing it for multiple hours each day, even after those holidays - at least until the DirectX 11 update in 2016 that made my daily-driver PC unable to play it, so I could only play it every other weekend on a different PC.
When I finally got a new PC, the first game I've installed and played was Space Engineers.
It's been a long journey, especially throughout the long Early Access period - with many ups and downs along the way. Over the years, I've seen countless builders, modders, content creators, and communities come and go.
And yet, every one of them was unique in their own way, united by the "need to create". I have also made many great close friends through the medium of Space Engineers, and even found a little bit of success on the Steam Workshop.
I got to see core features get added, such as oxygen, modding, Steam Workshop support, factions, scripting and so much more. The devs (Keen Software House, aka KSH) even added entire planets and moons - which were initially said to be impossible to implement.
The craziest part is that most of those things above were teased and progressively added and improved from community feedback through weekly updates during Early Access, with a drive that most game developers lack these days (Though KSH doesn't do weekly updates anymore, on account of "quality control").
Space Engineers made great use of Steam's Early Access program (being part of the first few games to actually use it), and the game has come a long way from where it started out.
However, modern Space Engineers development has been stagnating for multiple years now:
We have an ever-growing list of paid "decoration" DLCs, made to stretch out smaller and smaller content updates. Those now take upwards of 6 months to develop, and don't anything to the table that modders and scripters haven't already done years ago (and they usually do it better).
KSH has, in my eyes, lost much of the passion that drove the initial few years of development.
The updates we have been getting usually sound great on paper, but are consistently lackluster or mildly disappointing in execution.
The most evident example of this was the "Warfare" Saga:
In April 2021, we got the so-called "Warfare 1"-Update - a basic handheld combat rework that added a pistol, rocket launcher, and basic reload mechanics. This update was followed by an announcement to make 2021 into "The Year of War".
The next update (which was the only other update that came out during the "Year of War") was named "Heavy Industry" - which had nothing to do with warfare, and didn't change anything about the actual "industry" aspects of the core game either. It was just some new "panel" blocks, and another paid DLC with some industrial-themed variants of existing blocks.
The actual second "Warfare"-themed update (released almost a year after the first one) did add new ship weapons, but the implementation was rather underwhelming compared to what people were waiting almost a full year for.
Many, myself included, suspect that the reduction of development and update content is due to a sequel being in the works. KSH have been consitently showing off a new game engine, so its certainly plausible, but nothing has been confirmed yet.
Yet, despite the issues listed above... 10 years and 5400 hours in, I can't help but keep coming back to play some more, be it alone or with friends. I'm happy to have been part of this community and game for this long, and I'm certainly not planning on leaving anytime soon.

Hey, if you actually read all of this, thank you for taking time to do so. I hope you too may enjoy Space Engineers as much as I do. Its great to be able to write a review like this, and think back to the journey from Alpha to Post-Release.