Hardspace: Shipbreaker

I have this rule when it comes to the video games I play and review. It either has to be something I finish or put enough hours into. That’s why a majority of the time I try to finish games in one good go. Doesn’t matter how long it takes, so long as I don’t lose too much interest halfway. Of course there are occasional moments I get against this personal rule of mine. Play smaller titles between working through a larger game. For example, in 2023 I bought Octopath Traveler 2 the week it was released and kept playing until I published my review in May. Between that were the several other titles I covered like Prodeus and Kena. The point I’m trying to make is that I never dropped the games I cover, and if so I choose not to review. Why would I write about a game that I had not experienced the entirety of or put enough hours into? It’s not fair to the game, the devs who worked on it, or you the readers who are looking for an opinion  on what to spend your hard earned cash on. That said, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the longest it ever took me to beat a game. It’s not even the longest game I’ve ever beaten. 30 hours to roll credits is not a lot, especially for most people, but my reason for not finishing it sooner is rather interesting.

I purchased Hardspace: Shipbreaker all the way back in 2023 during a PlayStation sale. It was a game always recommended to me for its cool sci-fi universe, and the fact that I adore games that transform work into engaging core gameplay loops. Yhatzee Croshaw listed this as one of his top five games of 2022, and for a game to be awarded by him means it’s special. Spent twenty bucks and played Hardspace for a good week or two. The game was really fun! My money was well spent and at the time I put in around fifteen hours. Roughly half of the amount of time it took me to beat. Two specific things led me to eventually dropping Hardspace. First was that more games were starting to roll around and the end of 2023 was slowly approaching. I wanted to catch up on the titles I missed, so that’s what I did. Then 2024 came, even more titles released, and my interest gravitated towards them instead of Hardspace. The second main reason is that I simply just lost interest. The game was great, but the way it paced itself and difficulty wasn’t the best. (In fact, we’re gonna talk about this more at the end.) Looking up how long it takes to beat I then discovered it takes roughly 30 hours on average. Too long for what the game was aiming to do. This finally led me to dropping and moving onto other games. Which is a shame, because I do believe even now that Hardspace is amazing. A wonderful artistic counter argument whether games need to be fun or if it’s engagement we seek?

Recently I’ve been looking back at the games I haven’t finished. I want to spend my 2026 finally working through my backlog and everything I’ve previously purchased. Not everything though, I mean The Witcher 3 still bores the f*ck out of me despite having played a lot of games similar to it. The back of my mind couldn’t get itself off of Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It quickly became my ultimate goal of 2026. Finally wrap up the contract I had signed, and become one of few to tame the shipyard. Hardspace: Shipbreaker, the work simulator developed by Canadian indie studio Blackbird Interactive. Their record of games isn't the biggest, but they’ve put out  a good handful of noteworthy titles. In 2016, they assisted with the revival of the Homeworld franchise. Creating one of the most accessible entries to date that being Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. The game was received decently well, but not amazingly in the same way the past Homeworld entries were praised. With most criticism aimed towards bugs and performance. As of right now Deserts of Kharak sits with a 7/10 on Steam. Good, but not great. It’s what led to Homeworld 3 taking so long to eventually be made, because Gearbox weren’t exactly sure if the folks at Blackbird were truly the best to hand the series to. This then led Blackbird to pursuing others and eventually deciding to take some of the resources and funding they had over the years. To pour it into drafting a completely original idea that of course being Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

A game they drafted up during a game jam session and saw huge potential in. It originally started out as a game collecting junk on an asteroid, and transformed into what we know it as now. This wondrous work simulator about dismantling spaceships and selling the parts. Hardspace would then release into early access in 2020. A testing period where Blackbird could gain feedback as well as funding for further development. The final product would be released in 2022 and the results were great. This is Blackbird’s highest rated game to date not just for how cool the ideas were, but how finely polished Hardspace was. In a sea of work simulators this is one of few that truly stands out. Hardspace: Shipbreaker may not be a perfect game, and I have a fair amount of criticism that’ll explain why it’s one of the trickiest recommendations I’ve ever given. Yet, I love this game despite everything and always enjoyed coming back for more. It’s really a nice game to tune out to. Today we’ll be talking about Hardspace and why it may deserve your attention.

Story

Mankind has hit the 2300s and discovered the means to efficient space travel years ago. Able to travel from earth to mars within hours, and beyond. However, this advancement driven future has also become incredibly monopolized with companies constantly competing over who can make the best spaceships within a short period of time, and if not that then the best products. Reminds me a lot of The Outer Worlds, but with heavier focus on politics rather than comedy. One of the many companies of course being the Lynx Corporation who run one of the biggest shipbreaking enterprises in the solar system. Earth has experienced multiple such as mass unemployment, and Lynx is attempting to somewhat fix this opportunity. Offering job opportunities for all those who are struggling to find work, or a chance to earn a ship allowing workers to sail off into the stars and find a better home. You are one of many to sign up to work for Lynx. A soul wanting to see what space has to offer and forge a path of your own. Live a life that’ll not just impact yourself, but also all those who come within your grasp. Upon signing up for Lynx you’re also forced to reach certain agreements. A one point twenty-five billion dollar debt you must pay. Otherwise you are not allowed to leave the shipyard or return from where you once came. 

You’re given a habitat, food, tools, and assigned a crew to work with. Led by Joseph Weaver and other young souls trying to take care of themselves and family back home. Another part of your contract was uploading your memories & DNA into a database. Shipbreaking is dangerous. You will be working around tons of explosive barrels, nuclear reactors, spaces that can crush you, and the suit you’re given isn’t the most sustainable thing in the world. Dying is easy, so Lynx utilizes a special machine to bring you back from death. Manufacturing new bodies using DNA, and then throwing you back into the action. This tiny little detail comes back to bite you in the ass at some point, but we’ll get to it later. Those ships aren’t gonna break apart themselves, and you better get to work on that debt. One billion dollars is a lot away from true freedom, and where freedom lies is amongst the stars. Day after day working hard, and each day brings some form of trouble.

Gameplay

Everyday you start in your habit. Wander around, customize the posters on the walls, check your emails, and patch up your equipment. Tools can be upgraded using points gained from reaching salvage goals, or fixed if degradation goes too low. The only way to do either is to work. Choose one of many ships to salvage, and get to work. Depending on the mode you’re playing you may or may not have a timer. A limit as to how much you can salvage on a single ship. I decided to play on the mode that removes the timer. It’s great to know Shipbreaker gives you a choice on whether you want a challenging experience from the start or not.  There’s three bins you have to sort ship parts into, and highlighting your cursor over a part tells you which of the three to place parts. The barge for electronics or components that can be reused for future developed ships, the processor for metals that can be broken down and repackaged, and furnace for parts that cannot be reused for anything. What you want to be looking at are the parts being sorted into the barge. As much as large pieces of metal cost it’s the electronics and furniture that’ll sell for the most. Computer terminals, door controls, seats, storage bins, data banks, etc. These items are small and if not handled well they can break. Causing their price to drastically lower and be forced to then be placed into the furnace. It’s a good idea to forge a path between the items you are sorting. That is not to say placing them into the bins is easy. 

Some objects are incredibly heavy or need to be separated from what they are connected to. You start the game with two tools, a laser cutter and grapple beam, and overtime upgrade them so that your job becomes easier and more efficient. The laser cutter has a straightforward firing laser to melt specified target points, and horizontal slicer for cutting metal sheets or holes into walls. The grapple beam can pull objects out of place, move them towards where they need to be, or help pull yourself towards stable points. It also has tethers which can latch an object to another point. Meaning you don’t always have to drag parts to a place yourself. The player’s suit has a scanner that shows an xray of the ship, location of special parts, and what lies in the innards of a ship. It’s important to use the scanner, because you may not know what dangerous hazards lie inside the ship. Stuff like the fuel canisters and nuclear reactors like I mentioned. One of these will blow up if ignited, and the other needs to be placed into the barge quickly or else it’ll explode. These big explosions will tear apart the ship. Blasting parts into numerous pieces and lowering the value of several items. Planning is key in Shipbreaker. Do you save the dangerous parts for last, or go for them first because they are the highest value items and you want to get the danger out of the way. Ships become more complicated as you rank up and progress with the story. Containing larger amounts of stuff to salvage and dangerous components.  

If you're not careful when salvaging a ship you will die. Either from burning to death, frost, fiery explosions, nuclear explosions, hitting a wall so hard it cracks your helmet, not paying attention to your oxygen meter, etc. This will lead to a new body being generated, and new bodies cost a lot of money. Around one hundred thousand dollars, which will either be subtracted from money you may want to use for supply refills during jobs or added to your debt. Just do your job well, get reward upgrade tokens for equipment, and progress through the main narrative. Intriguing for the most part, and running into wild extreme territory. Let’s just hope someday you can be rid of the debt placed onto your shoulders. Stand tall, look back, and be proud of what you fought for.

Thoughts

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is the best game I’ve played that I can’t find myself recommending to a lot of people. It’s an incredibly well executed idea made with love, and gathering all the pros and cons I jotted down before writing this review I had more pros than cons. The problem is although the cons were less than the pros they were so big that they soured part of my experience. Not to a drastic degree because I still love Shipbreaker for what it is, but to a point where I can see who this game wouldn’t jell for and if so it’ll probably be a game they play for a few hours and stop. Kinda like what happened to me when I initially started this game up back in 2023. Gameplay wise Shipbreaker is strong. A majority of this game’s focus is placed on what you do regularly, and what you do is so engaging that there were periods I sat for two hours straight playing. The reason why I don’t play work simulators like Powerwash Simulator or Viscera Cleanup Detail is because there's not much punishment for failing or not paying attention. Work flows along all too smoothly, and it becomes more mindnumbing than actually engaging. It’s why I adore games like Papers, Please or Not For Broadcast because not only are they well paced but they reward you learning to master their systems. Work around problems and get better at the job. Shipbreaker is very much like that where the moment you stop thinking a f*ck up happens.

You accidentally ignite a fuel canister, or pull something that causes the nuclear reactor to start melting down. Creating situations where you have to carefully plan. Do I save the important part for last, or take care of it soon? How do I reach this part and create a safe path from it to where it needs to be? Shipbreaker has a lot of emergent gameplay scenarios, which is surprising for how basic your job is. There was a ship where I needed to pull the thrusters out of place. Unlike most ships though these thrusters were hooked to fuel lines, and immediately once I try to fry a single line it ignites. Slowly leading back to the fuel canister it was hooked to. Leading to me using my scanner to scope the layout of the thruster wing. Realizing what I had to do was quickly detach the four lines, use a tether to move the thruster out of the way, navigate the small crawling space quickly, and detach the fuel line. A moment that felt clever, because I was rewarded for slowly analyzing the situation. Shipbreaker is a rewarding game because players who try to rush a job will be punished, but taking your time to understand nets greater rewards. The limitations that are placed onto you, and working around said limitations. It makes every upgrade poured into the player’s toolkit worthwhile, because it allows their job to become more manageable as difficulty of ships scales higher. Who knew a little laser cutter can have sniping range. 

I also just want to say that Shipbreaker is a technically impressive game especially from devs who don’t have the same amount of firepower or budget that Triple A devs have. How each ship part is tracked, taken care of, and broken down when either separated or blown up. Explosions are annoying as they turn panels into dozens of pieces, but it’s neat for the game to still track these pieces and tell you exactly where they need to be. All while sustaining stable performance and not crashing out from long play sessions. The game design of Shipbreaker and its scaling of challenges is fantastic. If I were reviewing the game based on quality alone it’s perfect. However, there are the other components and this is where Shipbreaker begins to clash. A majority of the reviews for Shipbreaker are positive, but IGN scored it a 6/10. A good chunk of IGN reviews are pretty bad, but that score is pretty understandable to me. Shipbreaker is a great game, but it is not going to be for everyone nor will every player finish it. I played this on a PlayStation 5 and only 4.2% of players managed to beat the main story. The lowest completion rate for a game that I’ve seen in my life, but having finally accomplished this I can see why it’s substantially low.

This game takes 30 hours to beat, and I’m not sure if it fully benefits from being 30 hours long. On one hand it’s a work simulator. The type of game you play with music on in the background, or while listening to a podcast. It’s a game you play to relax, and Shipbreaker is relaxing despite just saying small mistakes can be made easily if not paying attention. On the other hand it has a story. Context as to why you are doing the job you’re given. An end goal for you to meet, and the pace for which said goal unravels at is slow. Too slow for the game’s own good. There are three acts in total with the second feeling particularly bloated in my opinion. From my understanding the story unravels the more ships the player takes on, and by reaching certain benchmarks. Each rank acquired from finishing enough salvage goals. Rank up requirements get higher each time, and to reach act three you need to be ranked eighteen out of thirty. I think this is where pacing starts to become whack for a lot of players. Not only are they grinding away endlessly until the story eventually decides to move on, but what they do starts to become repetitive. This is mainly due to one of the game’s biggest problems, and that is not having enough ship variety.

There are three ship types in this game, those being the Atlas, Gecko, and Javelin. These ships come in various forms, but not too many. Shipbreaker uses some procedural generation, but not a lot. Leading to some ship layouts and designs being repeated often. Difficulty is paced well, but once you hit the fifteen hour mark you’ve basically seen almost every ship this game has to offer. You’ve also unlocked a majority of the upgrades you need by then, so the game then becomes busywork. Not annoying levels of busywork, but in a way you’re waiting for something to then happen. Sometimes something does happen. Other times nothing. No conversation or characters complaining about anything, because what I think pushes the story is ranking up to the eventual requirement. That requirement being pretty high, and this is what led act two to being as long as it is. Act one on PlayStation 5 had at least 15.7% of players beat it, and then drops to 6.5% for act two. Then 4.2% for act three, but the drop between act two and three is reasonable.  Losing ten percent of your players between the first and second act is bad. I know a majority of people do not finish video games due to real life struggles, but this is bad in my opinion. It’s a sign of bad pacing or not doing enough to push your players till the end.

A real tragedy, because despite how badly paced the story of Shipbreaker is it’s actually written well and covers a good idea. I find Shipbreaker hard to talk about without spoiling the narrative, so I’m gonna assume you either don’t care or know the plot already. Act one is spent getting the player used to their job. With tutorials on how to use their tools and handle different hazards. The crew you work with are incredibly likable, and overtime you learn more about why they’re here. Either because they have nothing left, family to take off, want to get by, or because they simply enjoy being here. Then in fact two things take a drastic turn. Lynx wants to further maximize their profits, so they start sending administrators to each station. They also do this as unions have been on the rise, and they don’t want their workers getting the idea they’re being mistreated or to question the bigger picture. Your station is given Hal, and Hal is one the most unlikable villains I have encountered in a video game due to how realistic Hal is. This is a person who you have or will deal with in life. Someone who doesn’t think of the workers, their safety, or if the workplace is toxic or not. As long as they get to keep their status and money comes in.

Hal overtime becomes more of a nuisance rather than actual help. Monitor conversations, yell at workers to meet more goals in shorter periods of time, shush people for speaking up, and skip the training you would’ve received for new hazards and equipment. It works from both a gameplay and narrative point of view. Gameplay-wise because act one was spent getting you used to the mechanics, and now you have to apply them to new problems and puzzles. Storywise because of the situation you’re now facing. So when I died upon facing a problem I was forced into, I then got angry. It’s Hal enforcing a procedure that led to sloppier work. People forced into problems they can’t physically or mentally handle, or were unprepared to face. It leads to a boiling point when Hal begins insulting and targeting Kaito, the youngest member of your crew. Hal finally contacts higher ups and is able to enforce a new procedure after learning of the union rising. Lou is fired for sparking ideas of unionizing, and Lynx claims any property made by them is owned by them. That includes copied bodies used by workers, and everyone including you have died at some point. Attempting to leave is a violation. You are forever a slave to the people you signed up to work for, and this is made worse by the 1.25 million dollars they placed onto you. Leading to the most memorable mission in all of Shipbreaker. What my work eventually rewarded.

Industrial action, the game finally lifting all the restraints you face during sessions, and telling the player to go nuts. Take everything they learned, and destroy as much of a ship as possible. Ignite gas, set the nuclear reactors to meltdown, burn every part, etc. It’s such a joyous moment that pays off due to the tedium the player was forced to endure. This then leads to more stuff, and I think you get the picture. Shipbreaker despite its pacing issues has a loud message, and stands tall with it. Worker rights, unions, corporate exploitation, and when power is put into the wrong hands. It’s a game about basic people questioning the full picture, and realizing something needs to be done. They can’t just sit around and hope it’ll get better. All while watching the world burn. The game is a simple work simulator, but manages to become an artistic political piece with what it says.

A long time ago I debated with a friend the question of, “Do games need to be ‘fun’?” Fun is not always what we imagine it to be. Some games test your thinking, and others are focused on areas like exploration and discovery rather than combat. Some games are a slow burn or long because they need that time to express what they want. Others are quick, because they realize what they aim for can only be pushed so much so they get the good ideas out quickly. This led to my friend saying, “Games don’t need to be fun. They need to be engaging.” Shipbreaker is one of those games that tests that question. Personally I had fun, but not everyone else will. I found it to be draining near the end, but worth it upon rolling credits. Shipbreaker is a game that didn’t need to be fun to be art. It is the best game I cannot recommend to most people, but maybe some of you will find it interesting. You will play this game, potentially beat it, and walk away with similar thoughts I had. Amongst the tedium there was beauty lying underneath. I’m happy I finally got to beat Shipbreaker. In the end I am going to give Hardspace: Shipbreaker a 9/10 for excellence. 

9/10, Excellence