Kerbal Space Program

KSP is a great, flawed game. It can be insanely addicted and habit-forming, but also incredibly frustrating. Don't believe people when they say it's a game for everyone; it really isn't. What it is is a game for the dedicated perfectionist, someone who is willing to devote a large amount of time to mastering a very specific set of skills in order to succeed. Your first few hours with the game will most likely to excruciatingly difficult, and full of trial-and-error moments where you have literally no idea what you're doing wrong. But once you hit your groove and master the basic mechanics of the game, it can become incredibly rewarding. My advice to newbies is to go look at the wiki first. Join the forums. Look up the reddit. Immerse yourself in the actual community of the game before playing. Also go and subscribe to Youtubers like Scott Manley, who give brilliant tutorials on the basic game-play and provide inspirational examples of what you can accomplish in it. In many ways, playing KSP is like going on an international trip. You have to do a LOT of tiresome busywork - ordering tickets, checking passports, organizing luggage, learning local laws, etc - but it's all in preparation for a unique experience. Prepare well and you'll be left with an unmatched sense of accomplishment. Prepare badly and you'll be hitting that Refund button before the ten hour mark.

Is KSP a perfect game? No, of course not. Is it the near-unplayable buggy mess it's sometimes made out to be? Not at all. KSP is a really sweet balance of hardcore simulation and tongue-in-cheek silliness. The game models dynamics, kinematics, materials stresses, aerodynamics, and orbital mechanics, all in a way that feels realistics yet remains fun to play. On the other hand, your Kerbonauts have two stats, "Courage" and "Stupidity," and their science experiments include the Mystery Goo Experiment and taking barometric readings in space ("The gauge reads zero," the game helpfully informs you, while rewarding you with sweet Science you can use to buy acces to more rocket parts.) It is just about the diametrical opposite of a casual game, however. After the first two tiny steps towards space -- launching your first vessel and launching one that can get out of the atmosphere -- you will enter a nearly never-ending cycle of trial and error. Getting into orbit is hard. Re-entry is hard. Getting to Mun orbit is hard. Landing on the Mun is hard. Landing on the Mun, taking off, and returning to Kerbin is really hard. And let's not get started on space planes at this point, those things require some serious work. If you enjoy this kind of thing, you will love, love, love KSP. There will be spikes of rage as your beloved creations flip out of control, get torn up by aerodynamic forces, run out of fuel somewhere far out in the solar system, or fail in many other exciting ways. You'll go back to the drawing board, figure out what went wrong, fix it, try again, and be rewarded with a massive wash of euphoria when your design WORKED: you made it to the Mun and back, sent a rover to Duna, or a probe splashing down in Eve's explodium seas. Bugs? Yes there are bugs. They are quite minor in the grand scheme of things: orbital rendez-vous calculation tools flickering wonkily, wheels failing when they really shouldn't, landing gear being unreasonably finicky about angles, parts refusing to snap together properly when constructing a vessel, requiring random punching of buttons to get them to do so, that sort of thing. At this writing (1.1.3) the biggest issue with KSP has to do with spaceplanes: the atmospheric flight controls are just plain bad, which makes the already hard process of designing spaceplanes even harder. Fortunately modders have stepped to the rescue, and Atmospheric Autopilot completely fixes that problem. If you like space, and building things, and watching things you built blow up, give KSP a whirl. You will almost certainly love it.

KSP is a game that will teach you a lot of things, a game that will invite you to learn about space, about physic and orbital mechanics, about how rockets work. It's not the real world physic, but the way it does the job is close enough to teach you A LOT and after hundred hours of playing, when you read some NASA/ESA reports, it's finally mundane. You played a game had a lot of fun (and kaboom) and now you UNDERSTAND what those guys are saying. What games can boast of that? Not a lot since most of educationnal games are usually boring with an atrocious software... It's a game who will teach you that mistakeS are the key of success and that failure is fun. It's a game that allows you to reach stars and planets the way you want, to fly and experiment your own design solutions. You BUILD your own Space Program. Want an Apollo like mission? Yeepikai! Do you prefer some Space X Falcon landing? Enjoy the reentry! Want to launch spaceplanes? Fly safe! No mention to its dedicated community (the best I saw) with so great modders making the game even better. There are TONS of mods. Tools to provide more datas on your rocket and flight recorders, parts mods to build better/bigger/crazyier rockets/planes/boats... Graphic enhancement mods to turn the game into a magnificent visual experience. Man, nothing is better than a sunrise while in orbit with a nice graohical mod, you stop playing, you just watch, breathless, a little bit less jealous of real astronauts who can enjoy this moments for real cause you have your own now. The game is HARD. Learning curve is steep and you'll beat the dust A LOT! But, when you reach the Mun for the first time, when you performe your first rendez vous and dock, when you land on another planet for the first time. You feel like the king of the hill. You DID it! It was hard but finally you did it and no other game gave me this satisfaction. Those milestone are sweeter than any other game experiences. This game worth every cent it costs.

As a person hoping to soon begin my life in the field of educational research, and someone who loves video games with a passion, I love the fact that this game exists. It is almostalone responsible for turning me into a hobby space-nut. Makes me cry when I think of the path I would have been set on, if this game had existed when I was still a child. If you are coming into this expecting a quick-to-learn space program management experience, I recommend you curb your expectations. The management aspect of the game (career mode) feels bare bones, almost non-existent. I had some use for it at the start, but soon forgot it was even there, as I made more than enough money from contracts to support my future missions. The contract system, however, does help to give you some guidelines as t what missions you should pursue next. That being said though, the weakest part of the game is how it fails to teach players to play well enough. A tutorial system exists, with pre-created scenarios for you to tackle, but overall it does little to prepare you for the myriad of different challenges you are likely to face. If you want to be good at this game, be ready to look up video's on youtube (shameless plugging: You can check out my videos on the game if you want :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYqAp7M-vAQ&list=PLotBVT2gf2kHWvBp4iiU50KOFaTEtQzuJ ), and other tutorials online. Expect to fail many times. But trust me, that is a good thing. One of the key elements of a good game is a quick feedback loop, and this game lets you retry right away if you fail. You can learn easily from your mistakes, and with the right amount of patience and perseverance, it will reward you with a sense of accomplishment I don't think any other game can give you. Consequences of failure can be as severe or as light as you are comfortable with (remember to check these options), so experiment, and just have fun with it! I whole-heartedly recommend this game to all space exploration enthusiasts!

I started the game, and after the long loading phase, I started configuring it. Nice, I see that they thought about keyboard layouts. Then I start the training. - the key mapping don't seem to work correctly, there is a support for different layouts and the possibility to remap keys, but apparently not all of them - sent an email to the support, which didn't read it properly and told me to configure the keys, well, that's a good start - first training mission is fine - 2nd training mission doesn't work, a parachute is supposed to deploy but it doesn't. It's apparently a bug that has been around since 2015 or even longer, and that they never bothered to fix - 3rd training mission doesn't work either, the player is supposed to load a "Hopper" module, which isn't there, and to replace the engine but there are no replacement parts. It's a known problem too, that was never fixed. I asked for a refund, the game must have been great back then, but now it's not maintained anymore and doesn't seem very stable.