Hardspace: Shipbreaker – in space no one can hear you work (pic: Focus Home Interactive)

A satirical glimpse at the future of working in outer space, that turns trying to form a union into a compelling gameplay experience.

Consensus suggests we’re living through the latter stages of capitalism’s current arc. Rebuilding Europe after World War 2 fostered a spirit of everyone being in it together, whereas the end of the 20th century felt more like everyone for themselves. Hardspace: Shipbreaker takes the premise that this process continues to accelerate, concentrating obscene wealth into the hands of a vanishingly small number of people, while everyone else struggles just to make ends meet.

Fast forward to the 23rd century and not only are mega-corporations now running everything but 200 years of human space travel has left behind dangerous levels of debris across the solar system. The answer to this problem is a bit of good old-fashioned recycling, and the company that gets the contract is Lynx, your employer.

To be fair, you’re not really an employee so much as an indentured labourer, the astronomical fees for getting you into Earth orbit, plus the rental for the various pieces of equipment you need – plus bed, board, oxygen, and frequent medical expenses – meaning you start the game well over $1 billion in debt. Your earnings in the game gradually chip away at that number, but not in any meaningful way, especially given the daily fees you pay just to live.

Your job at Lynx is to space walk out to the hulks of abandoned spaceships and use a laser cutter to chop them up for scrap. Computers, electronics, and furniture are high value junk that needs to be deposited in a barge, while aluminium and useful metals get sent to the processor, leaving the flotsam and jetsam to be fired into the incinerator. You’re paid to get the right spaceship parts in the right bins. Mess it up and you’ll be fined.

You’ll also often get yourself killed, whether by accidentally drifting into a furnace, being caught in an explosion or electrical arc, or crushed to death by a fast-moving chunk of butchered spacecraft. There is a permadeath mode, but by default each time you die your personality gets downloaded into a fresh clone – at your own cost – letting you get straight back to work. In the 23rd century even death doesn’t interfere with productivity.

Every in-game morning an AI voice awakens you with a GLaDOS style cold-hearted platitude framed as inspiration. The fact that it addresses you as Cutter 9346-52 underlines the impersonal nature of your employment and the various layers of management you encounter spout exactly the same sort of vacuous corporate speak about being part of a ‘family’ that’s already making workplaces feel eerily dystopian.

Once outside the ‘hab’ where you live, you use a jetpack to fly over to the inert hull of the spaceship you’re working on, where you set about dismantling it panel by panel. To start with ships are simple hunks of metal waiting for you and your laser torch to dismember them, but as you gain experience, increasing your shipbreaker’s licence level, you’ll be offered ships that are bigger, more complicated, and considerably more dangerous.

That danger comes in a number of forms, from combustible fuel lines to electrical circuitry that’s still powered, to coolant leaks making surrounding materials brittle. There are always fuel flushing systems and circuit breakers but they’re often inaccessible until you’ve already damaged the very system liable to electrocute or set you on fire.

You’ll also need to worry about air pressure. In the vacuum of space, if you puncture or cut into a pressurised room the explosive decompression will often send its contents hurtling towards you, damaging your spacesuit or occasionally just killing you outright. Removing ships’ fusion reactors is even more hair raising, their countdown towards meltdown starting as soon as they’re disconnected, enforcing a hasty trip to the barge before they explode, taking you and a load of valuable salvage with them.

If all that sounds stressful, it’s a testament to the quality of the game that it never feels it. Floating around with your jetpack is a slow business that teaches you about inertia and momentum, as you tease enormous metal panels into the right hoppers. Accompanied by mellow slide guitar music, the process of breaking ships turns out to be oddly relaxing, apart from the odd dash to the shopping kiosk as your oxygen supply dips ‘below statistically profitable levels’.

Hardspace: Shipbreaker – the game is by the same team making Homeworld 3 (pic: Focus Home Interactive)

There’s a wide range of available upgrades for your helmet, suit, jetpack, cutter, and tractor beam. They gradually become available as you level up your licence and need to be bought with perk points earned by successfully junking ships. Some upgrades feel a lot more important than others but given your almost unlimited potential for earning them, and the ability to reset the points and spend them on something else, you’re actively encouraged to experiment.

If Hardspace: Shipbreaker has a weakness it’s the eventual sense of repetition. Although there’s an ever-expanding inventory of ships to break, actually taking them apart doesn’t vary all that much. Pull off external panels, find hatches, equalise pressure, drain fuel lines, dissolve interior fixings, tether sets of panels to the right processing bin, and repeat. Your shifts working in the breaker’s yard can look and feel extremely similar to one another.

Variety is added in the form of relationships with union-fomenting co-workers, and your under-the-counter salvage operations to start refurbishing your own spaceship. That involves stealing small pieces of salvage that you squirrel away using unauthorised software on your employee terminal. There are also changes in management, bringing with them ever more toe-curling additions to the talking heads telling you what to do.

The game’s voice acting is never less than completely convincing, and the used, battered look of both the hab and shipbreaking facility, along with the perfectly metered corporate doublespeak, make for excellent, satirical world building. Dissecting disused spaceships is slow, methodical work and good fun, even if in the longer term it doesn’t offer quite enough variety of challenge.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £32.99
Publisher: Focus Home Interactive
Developer: Blackbird Interactive
Release Date: 20th September 2022
Age Rating: 16

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A satirical glimpse at the future of working in outer space, that turns trying to form a union into a compelling gameplay experience.