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This is a review for Vertical Slice 2.

ONLY buy this if you wanted to support the company in their development of Space Engineers 2! DO NOT EXPECT a better more feature rich game than Space Engineers...yet.

I will give a rating system based on where it compares with the original Space Engineers. 5/10 would mean I think it is comparable.

4/10 Performance : The game is in early access so I am not going to be harsh its janky and random fps drops are common. I even lost the ability to save my game at one point.

1/10 Story : One thing the developers wanted to add was a story / campaign, but did mention it would be optional. The optional part is the only reason I gave it got a that 1 point. I do not know how to be nice here, its terrible. Everything I have seen / heard from the campaign so far is "made for TV" levels of drama and cringe.

3/10 Survival: I cant imagine anybody dying in this game unless your trying to kill yourself. Resources like O2 and power deplete but not at a rate that should bring anybody concern. The biggest risks you can do would be janky ship designs.

4/10 Building: You can build with different sized blocks on a single ship and it does not risk the wrath of KLANG to make work! This is a great feature and provide massive improvements to ship design and aesthetics. now for the bad news. You can just make any block with raw resources using "Back Pack Building" meaning instead of me needing 10 iron plates I could just the same amount of iron need to make 10 iron plates and use that instead. In other words the current state of the game production and logistics blocks are borderline pointless. I greatly disapprove of this "feature". I know things are in Alpha and are not balanced or working fully as intended yet (or so I am told). I am however being honest about where the game is currently.

5/10 Mining: This is mostly the same as it was in Space Engineers but with a couple changes. One you now auto collect mined resources. They also removed stone as a resource. You just delete dirt and rock. Stone in the original was an early game resource you could get small amounts of basic resources from like iron, so you could refine basic parts. My understanding of this choice is they did not want players to not mine huge amounts of rock to bypass finding early game ores. I get that this is Space Engineers 2 not the original but this is a scary part of development and something tricky to navigate because its basically the developers saying your fun is wrong! do it this way. I do not agree with this change as I think mining rocks and getting small amounts of resources was what fed the desire to find real nodes of resources so you could be more efficient. Later it created logistical challenges in your refineries and mining ships.

In summary the current build and the direction the game seems to be going has me concerned. I think they are targeting New Players with easier dumbed down mechanics and features that made Space Engineers special. Making Veteran players look at this with a mindset of why buy 2 when the original is better? In the original game mistakes were expensive and costly, but their impact taught you a lesson. You adapted, expanding production, your logistics, and your designs so the next time you lost a rover or a ship it didn't sting as bad. Years of knowledge playing the game could always be improved and challenged with new adventures. Space Engineers 2 however is starting to feel like a watered down version of the original with a lot of "hand holding" in a low risk environment. All that said I did buy the game supporting the team and hope that some day it would be even better than the original. I hope they listen to older players on some of these new features and make them optional / adjustable... or murder violently.

At this stage the game looks nice. But.
It's unstable, the flight mechanism is trash,
manuvering and landing is practically none-existent,
Orientation and leveling hud is missing,
the sounds are alover the place and the cockpit screens are way too bright.
There is still a lot of work to be done on it so I DON'T RECOMMEND buying SE2 right now.

I really like the overall concept of Space Engineers 2, but the Grid Ownership system is a deal-breaker for me right now. For a game literally called Space Engineers, it feels completely backwards that you can’t salvage or repurpose ships you encounter.

I ran into a situation where my main ship got wedged between rocks. There was a nearby hauler just sitting there, unused, that would have been perfect to repurpose and get myself unstuck. But because of grid ownership, that wasn’t an option. Without a recent save, I ended up losing hours of progress.

That kind of restriction kills the improvisation and problem-solving that the game’s name promises. I’ll probably come back in a year and see if this system has been reworked.