Kerbal Space Program

I've been with this game since 0.18 and I can say it always has me coming back for more. Creating a rocket, learning how to get into orbit, landing on the Mun, and visiting other planets - lots of mayhem and craziness on the way, but more fun than anything. Best modding community out there, but the stock game is the best! Welcome to 1.0!

...A lot? then step this way, please. Okay, so to start off: KSP is quite an excellent game in my opinion. But the more observant reader might have picked up on the fact that there are only three stars next to the review's title. That's due to one major criticism I have to level at this game, which is that it doesn't like explaining things. While playing, it explains - to use the scientific term - "f**k all". I'm not even talking about the physics or engineering principles involved, I'm talking about even basic game controls. I'll just err on the side of caution here and assume I'm relatively stupid (university degree notwithstanding), but you should expect to spend a very long time 1) reading the in-game wiki, then 2) realizing it is itself bad at explaining a lot of things, then 3) either reading tutorials or watching them on YT. If you can bring yourself to endure that for about 20-30 hours (your mileage may vary), you're gonna have fun with a unique, challenging and rewarding game. If you are into the whole space exploration and engineering thing. But if you're not, why would you even be contemplating buying this? PS: Oh, also the tech tree can really screw you over and make your progression grind to a halt if you don't make the right decisions in the early game. TL;DR: really great if you can stomach the "wiki marathon & tutorial binge watching" double feature that's required to get into the swing of things.

The game is pretty fun and all, but the review botting hurts it a bit. I'd give it four stars if the developers had more integrity.

Might look too much of a challenge with all physics and stuff, but it's all very rewarding when you finally get the basics of space flight. I never had a clue how you reach the moon, or other planets - I though it's all about aiming straight to them and burn engines. This game taught me how it actually works - it's all about orbits! You are always orbiting something, and traveling somewhere is all about changing your orbit to match the target. And time it right! How and where you do that is what you'll learn while playing this game. As well as learn about Oberth Effect, Delta-v, TWR, apoapsis/periapsis, and so on and so on! I'm only 10-15 hours into the game, which means I'm just done with the tutorials. I'm glad I did quite a bit of research before buying this, cause there are lots of important concepts that are left out from the tutorials. I would recommend youtube tutorials by Mike Aben, those are the best! The 3-dimensionall Navball can be pretty hard to grasp for example, but just give it time and try things out in the game. It's not for the impatient, not a game to speedrun! ;p I really understand how some people have thousands of hours in this game! The game looks very dated, but with some easy-to-install-mods, grabbed from the official game site, it will look awesome! I recommend at least Scatterer + EVE Redux + Astronomers Visual Pack, to get athmosphere and clouds etc. Only downside so far for me, except the very steep learning curve, is that the objects in map-view are tiny in 4k resolution. You can scale everything in the GUI except these! Sure you can play in 1440p or whatever, but as everyone know the text instead gets a bit blurry then...

I've now played this game for about 30 hours and can confidently state that it is the best realistic NASA style space sim I've played to date. It's a lot of fun to play, with endless goals and ways to play. I see a lot of complaints, especially here on GoG about "spyware" and EULA and whatnot... This game is offline. If you have the EULA so much and are so paranoid that the game will use spyware to take data from you, just play in a VM. Honestly if you are so tech savvy to understand how spyware works then just use that savvy to install linux in a new partition or even a new drive to put all your spyware EA games and No Man's Sky. For any normal people, don't sweat it and run in controlled folder access without running the game on administrator privileges to see if it even so much as saves a file. The GoG version, upon purchase, gives you the download for the original version of the game, beefore any of the spyware scandal. It then gives you access to the separate patches and updates that have taken place since. If you are honestly worried, just play the original version by Squad and don't download the patches. Great game.