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The joy of stripping armour in Hardspace: ShipbreakerHot shuts EXPOSED

Hot shuts EXPOSED

VINDICATION. That’s whatHardspace: Shipbreakersays to me. I havehintedseveraltimesthat salvage is grossly under-represented in games. And now here’s a game all about it, and it as excellent as I’d hoped.

Despite being an estimate year from release, Hardspace Colon Shipbreaker already gets a lot of things right. But my favourite thing about it is one I didn’t even expect to feel so good: peeling the armour off a ship.

The basic idea is near self-explanatory. You’re a salvage worker taking apart disused ships in a drydock, leisurely jetpacking around in zero gravity, climbing (or cutting) inside them before cutting them down from within. You need to extract the complex components like engines, computers, and even furniture, and slice the metallic frames into manageable chunks for the furnace. All while keeping the ship from exploding, the fuel and coolant from leaking, and yourself from being fatally electrocuted. All of this is satisfying. But the part that’s brought me such unexpected joy all week is the moment when you take off the armour plates.

I don’t use the tethers much. Even though the tutorial man repeatedly emphasises how much you should use them, I move most of my salvage out of the ship manually. Tethers aren’t free, you know. But the exception to that is the armour. And here’s why.

The transition from clambering around narrow, dark backstage spaces makes it all the sweeter.

The only cut I made was a small hole to climb into the engineering section. Despite that ship’s complex pipes, awkward skeletal structure, and its volatile reactor being about 8 times the size and far more difficult to extract than the miniature ones I’d dealt with before, I was able to systematically take it all apart with only one minor accident. Knowing, even when there’s no visible tell, that you’ve made the right incisions to pull away that section now? That’s special.

And heaving away its massive armour chunks?Heaven.

I’ll be in my bunk.