SpaceCraft: A Universe of Tedium, Wrapped in Frustration
I wanted to like SpaceCraft. I really did. After forty-odd years of this hobby, from the Atari 2600 to the latest ray-traced marvels, I can still get a flutter of excitement from a well-crafted spaceship and the promise of the unknown. SpaceCraft’s store page promised a vast, player-driven galaxy of exploration, base-building, and automation. A mix of No Man’s Sky and Satisfactory, they said. A spiritual successor to the glory days of space sims. What we got, instead, is a game that feels like it was designed by a committee that hates fun, a game that actively punishes you for trying to engage with its systems.
Let’s start with the tutorial. Or, as I call it, the “How to Waste Two Hours and Feel Nothing” experience. You’re a corporate debt slave, because of course you are, and you’re given a rickety starter ship. Your first tasks involve flying to a barren, lifeless planet, holding down a button to mine some rocks, and then flying back to the station. Repeat. The planets are all the same – a beige, procedurally generated wasteland with a few resource nodes scattered about. There’s no sense of wonder, no alien vistas, no atmosphere. It’s just a backdrop for a mechanic that feels like it was ripped from a mobile game from 2012. The flight model is equally joyless. Your ship handles like a floating brick with no inertia and no ability to roll. It’s less like piloting a starship and more like moving a cursor in a 3D space. The game stutters every time you transition between a planet and space, or even just enter a space station. It’s a technical mess that would have been unacceptable in a finished game, let alone one asking for thirty dollars in Early Access.
The core gameplay loop is where SpaceCraft truly reveals its contempt for the player. The loop is simple: fly to planet, mine ore, fly back to station, smelt ore (while staring at a progress bar), craft components (while staring at another progress bar), then do it all over again. The mining is mindless, the crafting is tedious, and the travel times are excruciating. You will spend the vast majority of your time in this game doing absolutely nothing but waiting. Waiting for your ship’s battery to recharge. Waiting for your mining laser to cool down. Waiting for a smelter to finish. Waiting for a jump drive to spool up. This isn’t a game; it’s an exercise in patience, and not the rewarding kind. It’s the kind of patience you need to sit in a DMV waiting room. The game’s pacing is so glacial that I fell asleep at the keyboard twice during my first session, and I drink enough black coffee to power a small city.
The game’s MMO nature is equally baffling. It’s an always-online experience, but you barely interact with anyone. You see nameplates floating in the void, but there’s no meaningful cooperation. The corporation system is a broken, unfinished mess. You can’t even properly group with friends to share progress. The game is full of artificial limitations designed to force you into a multiplayer experience that simply doesn’t exist. You’re limited to a paltry number of bases, a tiny base footprint, and a laughably small daily sales limit. It feels like the game was balanced by someone who thinks that making players suffer is the same as providing a challenge. As one player put it, “This game has no idea what it wants to be.” It wants to be an MMO, but it punishes you for being online. It wants to be a factory game, but automation is so slow that hand-crafting is always superior. It wants to be an exploration game, but every planet is the same dull rock.
Then there’s the progression. SpaceCraft’s progression is a masterclass in artificial scarcity. Everything is gated behind an obscene amount of grind. Want to build a better ship? You’ll need to spend dozens of hours gathering resources, unlocking tech, and waiting for factories to churn out components. The XP system is broken, rewarding you with a pittance for your efforts. The research system is a joke, with labs taking twelve or more hours to unlock a single new item. The game actively discourages you from building and experimenting. It wants you to grind, and then grind some more. The ship customization, which is the game’s one genuinely interesting feature, is locked behind so many walls that most players will never get to properly enjoy it. I spent thirty hours in the game and never felt like I had any meaningful control over my ship’s design. It’s a promise of a feature, not a feature itself.
The game is riddled with bad design decisions. You can’t deconstruct buildings until you’ve unlocked a certain level, so misplace a power pole and you’re stuck with it. You’re taxed for crafting outside your base. You can only refuel your warp drive at a handful of stations. If you run out of fuel, you take massive damage every jump. The game punishes you for exploring, for building, for playing. It’s a game that seems to hate the very idea of you having fun. The community on the official Discord is, by all accounts, toxic and dismissive. When players report bugs or ask for help, they’re told to “stop bitching” or to go play another game. This is not the behavior of a development team that respects its player base.
There are bright spots, I suppose. The soundtrack is decent. The ship-building mechanics, when you finally get to them, have potential. I can see the skeleton of a good game buried under all this tedium. But right now, SpaceCraft is not a good game. It’s a cynical, time-wasting grind that feels more like a second job than a hobby. It’s an Early Access title that launched with a roadmap full of promises and a game full of broken systems. The developers seem more interested in adding microtransactions and new features than fixing the fundamental problems with their game. The player reviews are a sea of frustration, with hundreds of hours of playtime followed by a weary, resigned recommendation to stay away. The consensus is clear: this game, in its current state, is not worth your time or money.
I’ve seen this before. A game with a great concept and a poor execution, one that promises the stars but delivers a rock. I’ll check back in a year or two, to see if Shiro Games has managed to pull a No Man’s Sky and turn this mess into something worthwhile. But for now, I can only offer a single piece of advice: steer clear. There are too many other games that respect your time, that offer genuine joy and challenge. Go play Satisfactory. Go play Empyrion. Go replay the classics. Don’t waste your precious hours on a game that will only leave you feeling empty and annoyed. SpaceCraft is a monument to missed potential, a game that forgot the most important rule: games are supposed to be fun.
