Early Impressions: Space Engineers

When I was in my early teens, my mates and I would all go to someone's house, hook up our computers and – after about four hours of wrestling with the brutal networking abilities of Windows 98 – play games together. One of the most popular was Battlefield Vietnam, a brilliant confluence of action and strategy, one of the most awesome parts being that loads of you could load into a chopper or other vehicle, with one player flying and everybody else shooting.

The only game I'd team up with my mates in real life to play these days is Minecraft, there's something so social and chilled out about it, and the feeling of real co-operation is something you don't see these days in many games. While it's very fun and rewarding to build stuff together, I do sometimes find myself hankering for the old-fashioned team-based combat, or at least competitiveness, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that. As if in answer to all of our prayers arrives the prosaically-titled Space Engineers.

If you've ever played Battlefield, Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program or, ideally, all three, then this is probably the game that you've been waiting for, whether you realise it or not.

Being in Early Access, Space Engineers is still receiving significant updates every single Thursday, the most recent slew of features have been around making the game more immersive and complex, adding things like remote-control cameras, programmable button panels and blast doors, but even at this stage, the game feels complete enough to drop the relatively meagre €18.99 on.

Set in space (d'uh), the game is very similar to Minecraft; you need to mine materials to build tools to mine better materials to build your stuff, which is where it starts to get really interesting. There are three different classes of structure:

• Large ships
• Small ships
• Stations

The large ships are things like the Battlestar Galactica, or the U.S.S. Enterprise. These are spaceships big enough for you to walk around in. They can have engine rooms, shuttle bays, bridges, brigs, cargo bays, infirmaries etc. They can be crewed by just one person, or loads of people, and can take a lot of damage. They are also big enough to carry other, smaller ships. If you want to build a carrier that with Galactica-esque launch times that fires out smaller ships? Someone's already figured out how.

The difference between small ships and large ships (apart from the size) is that the smaller ships just have a cockpit to get into, and that's it. They're not meant for walking around inside, they're a shuttle, or more likely a mining vessel or fighting ship. They're faster, more agile, but don't take nearly as much punishment.

Space stations are very similar to the large ships, but they don't have engines and are designed for other ships, large and small, to attach to, handy for repairs, secret projects or just kicking back at Quark's Bar.

Where this gets really cool is that once you've built your big ships, small ships and space stations, you can add other players to the level and engage in team-based battles. The craft you create can be assigned to a certain team, to make it harder for randomers from the other team to wander into your ship and start taking control. You can also take advantage of the physics models and tech to create things like traps or trick doors, build complex structures and mechanisms, design your own weapons – the list is endless.

As mostly a Mac user, I've only really started dipping a toe in; it's Windows-only for the moment, though an Xbox One port is coming and it'll be on Mac at some point in the future. If you're interested in playing co-operatively or competitively at some point, please let me know, I'd love to get more multiplayer time in with it! You can leave a comment below or add me on Steam.