A P̸̮͔̘̀͘o̴͊l̶̢̍̒i̴t̴́ì̷̇ĉ̵̠̏á̴̈́̊l Hardspace Shipbreaker Review

Play Disco Elysium

The idea of the media, of all fucking things. Being what helps "save" the workers is just such... absolute bullshit that only a lefty jackass in this so-called modern age could pull out of their ass. Whisper networks, bullying, manipulating details to suit agendas. The media in this story wouldn't have championed them, they'd have labeled them as dangerous whatever-wing extremists and did everything they could to push the public opinion on them so far into the negative that the workers own families either think they're crazy. Or snitch on them.

If you're making a sci-fi dystopia about a nightmare corporation and nobody dies under mysterious circumstances, you've fucked up.

Lou should've been killed during a "job" that clearly never happened, and something fucky happened with her DNA so she can't be cloned. Oops! Oh well, get back to work, slave.

i was expecting the battle of Blair mountain and i got a London protest

Imagine if one of your striking co-workers has an accident and dies on the job. Not a problem, the company can revive them...

But then they never revive.
"A glitch with the DNA sequencer" the company says.
They tell you "it's unfortunate, but it was a freak accident that could happen to anyone... and you should really get back to work."

Rock and stone!

I refused to buy the game after finding out that one of the devs biggest fear is men having reciepts to prove that they didn't harrass or abuse coworkers, and by having those reciepts they undermine the credibility of the women making the accusations.
funnily enough she got metoo'd shortly after saying that bs by a female coworker

Its like, a leftist game with a leftist message, but also with corporate approval. It just couldve been such an amazing game if they were willing to take up a more revolutionary story. A more realistic one. A truly leftist game.

Absolutely awesome video

They should have added a family to the mc, and the company should have threatened that if you didn't pay the debt, they would force your son to join you.
Once the story reached that point you could actually work with your son on the ships, then after some bonding moments the inevitable will happen and your son will die.
After that the company will be like , oops we didn't took his DNA, then you play sometime without music, sometimes you get an angry and heartbreaking call of your wife crying in the phone, after that if you don't make progress with the debt, they will hit you up with we can revive your son etc etc (I can progressively add more and more twisted and sick shit but you get the point).

Thinking about it, it might have been interesting for the debt you start out with seem manageable in maybe 10 ships if done well, but then a "extremely valuable" ship comes in as the 9th ship with an "unexpected" package that destroys the entire ship and you get blamed for it, causing a mountain of debt to come on to you, make it happen everytime you get to one more ship away from being debt free, make it seem like it might actually be the players fault until it comes out that non of those ships were good, they were beaters with a planted surprise by the company to blame you and keep you working for free.

But also the costs more to do it would work as well, but I feel like one gives some amount of hope that gets pulled away each time

Man, a game about unionization made by people who'd scab.

There's no steaks in space Cobbler.

"If McDonald's would tweet it, it's not leftist"
Truer words have never been spoken. "The left" has been stolen from actual workers.

Yo cobbleboi. You are mixing up financial leftism with social leftism. A financial liberal (right) company can still very well push destruction of the core family (left)

money having value would be so eazy, just make a ticket home you have to buy, and make it so to get there, you have to do everything 110% perfect, so then you would constantly get so close, only to get knocked back down into debt when you make a mistake, never quite making it there

Currently more or less finished the game and this is very similar to my experience. The debt is completely irrelevant and the only thing from not trashing the ships as soon as I'm done with them is that the actual shipbreaking experience is just that good, even with only 4 basic shiptypes.


I'd say the most interesting point in the story is Kai snitching on the unionization efforts, but even that isn't a real surprise. Still a very rewarding game, but I feel like the actual scripted story was an after-thought to an otherwise good atmosphere.

Play citizen sleeper the story is what you wanted this game to be

This game could have asked the question "what happens when you're forced to live as a slave and not even death can set you free?"

Actually in a way some of the criticized points are very realistic for today - like the middle management would very much like to control your very step but even when they can they end up way to lazy to actually do it and I could sing songs about the office workers who are professionals in faking to work (there are quite a buch of people in big cooperations who will spend more effort to fake doing work than it would actually take to just do their work...)

In short this game is good but it could have been great

Lethal Company does this better and its a borderline shitpost

Why am i not surprised that cobbler listens to red scare

While the debt is one thing (maybe paying off installments can represent itself in a nicer cubical), it makes sense you arent punished, its a gig economy. Sure you are wasting your free ships but those ships arent there for them to make profit out of, they are "gifts", a moral thing, a write off to make it seem like your big chance to make a dent. The money they got from you is from you "Buying" the ship.
And they cant punish you too badly cause the games supposed to be casual (the story was added later) and a punishment spiral will just cause players to quit.
As for the fake leftism thing. One thing ive read hos how certain issues and opinions, much like fashion and certain jobs, are kind of a status symbol now. Amazon can promote gay rights and the environment not just as a distraction but a flex.

I want to know what you think about disco elysium

Dont tell duke nukem, but all the sexy alien babes work for company money.

Cobbler should play Cruelty Squad

What’s the name of the outro music?

Help I accidentally removed a class 1 reactor core without making a proper hole again

Shipbreakers is lowkey corporate propaganda.

Your work shift is 15 minutes. You can make 10's of millions of dollars in a single shift, and as long as you spend the time to think and pay attention, you will never die. You do rack up a ton of debt but it's in a hyper-inflation currency; even the wrappers and bottles for space food and drink is worth hundreds of dollars. If you perform well and can salvage at least one ship every 2-3 days, that's around 40-50 million per week. At the pace I was going as a mid-ranked salvager I was on trajectory to have that debt paid off in a few years. You do eventually gain the ability to own your own kit outright, meaning each of those things is no longer a daily drag on your finances. Your worst fear is an incompetent moron finding their way into managerial positions because corporations tend to have problems with ensuring managers are quality material, especially when you're as bloated as, 'the biggest company in existence.' And employees still find it in themselves to complain. About 15 minute work shifts and cartoonish payouts for it.


And when all is said and done? The union doesn't actually help you. You? Well you die in the first five minutes of the game to collect your genetic material for the spares system- even though that's not how it works, and there was no reason to kill the character- so it's actually your clone who achieved everything. And the union, oddly, made sure the Spares program stayed in place.


So it's both corporate propaganda and kind of horrifying.


For the game itself it feels like it needed another year in the tank. Dismantling ghost ships should feel like you're jousting with SHODAN rather than having the occasional 'tee hee I opened a door' thing, the ability to skip dialogue should have been an option, nuclear reactors can't explode (doubly so in space) and that's not how a melt down works, the situation on Earth should have been explained better, I could go on.

this is my favourite video, the left has truly fallen. And it is so over.

A leftist who isn't an idpol obsessed dysgenic who actually cares about the class struggle? Fvck me man, never knew you guys were still a thing you've just earned yourself a devotee of cobblerism! if only you were more socially conservative...

You're almost like Sseth but left-wing instead of alt-right.

W... Wait, is... Is cobbler a leftist???? 😱








....dope.

Would have nice if they just allowed the game to be a chill timekiller set in bluecollar space just doing a 9 to 5 in a zero g recycling shipyard while working on your weekend joyride on the side. Everything future and space just has to suck for some devs, just like the square peg in a round hole unskippable story and dialogue it now has.

Do Not Buy This Game For More Than 15 Dollars. The Devs are Liars!

I still think this game had a chance for a perfect ending.
Imagine for a second
The end is you essentially giving up
I would like to have a diary with 'days since i started'
Whenever you end the story the conclusion is 'it is pointless'
And then you end yourself
However due to the situation you wake up
But not the day after
But like somewhere between 10 and 100 years later
You check your diary
It tells you a short thing
After you realized what is happening
All your former yous decided to make enough money to be BARELY positive after the revive before they fled into death to escape
A promise to themselves that there will be a freedom eventually
When you wake up you have an essentially finished ship and do the last few things in a cutszene
You finally reach 0
You leave in a company ship back to earth
Knowing full well, everyone you ever knew is either aged a lot or has died and the world you return to is just as bleak as the one you just left behind
However
After
It tells you

Great alternative ending for the game.

Union is formed.
Lynx turns off everyone's immortality because of union objections to not letting employees die.
A series of "accidents" occur while Lynx claims it's because they had to cut back on safety regulations due to reduced profits and 90% of the union is killed outright. Including the player.
30 years later Lynx revives you to continue salvaging ships, with no sign that the Union ever existed, and no evidence you ever did any work to pay off your debt, which has increased due to compound interest.
You continue the game in new game +, History repeating itself, ad infinitum.

duke with the monolith killed me on philosopical, mental, and humor-ical level.

LOVE the McDonald's quote, couldn't have put it better myself.

Nobody is winning. It's the corporatist state vs the people, not left vs right bruh

puts on the Hardspace: shipbreaker OST while playing the Lancer ttrpg

I like to believe because they own lue's dna the voicemessage about them being back home is really just fabricated by corporate whilst they do unknowable horrendous "union busting"

more like hardcock shitbreaker

It's funny because I felt the debt wasn't as impactful as it could have been because after salvaging a couple of ships, I did the math and realized the debt was very manageable, in that I could have paid it off within an in-game year, and that was with the lower-value early-game ships. The amount of pay you receive for salvage is kind of ridiculous.
I was frankly disappointed when I finished Industrial Action and they paid it off, because I was enjoying watching the number go down.

I ended up not participating in the strike at the end, and instead salvaging the ship as usual... And got AN ACHIEVEMENT for doing so. Frankly the Lynx corporation is downright KIND for how much power they have. You're given each ship for free and keep 100% of the profit from its parts, paying only your 0.01% interest rate and the cost of renting your tools, which you're also able to just buy out before the end of the campaign. You could pay off the entire $1.2b loan in less than half an in-game year and from there keep raking in pure profit. It's a better deal than untrained entry level jobs in the real world have ever given anyone, with the added bonus of functional immortality. It's so easy to make a believably cruel mega corporation and they somehow failed to. Resurrection and item costs could have literally been 100x higher without making the game any more difficult, but would make the debt cycle seem real. (by the end of the campaign, I had cleared about a third of the "endless debt" already and was still picking up speed). They could have made you buy (or take out a loan for) each ship with a maximum 10% profit margin on its scrap if you sorted everything perfectly and didn't break anything (and you will have to break things, often). Clearly they were torn between their fun game concept and any real "bad feels", but those numbers don't affect the game feel at all, really, and would have gone so far towards making the gameplay resemble the story at all.

Would have been interested in comparison to the personal situation of the crew in the walking sim TACOMA as something more realistic and less like The Office. The ending of the game may pull punches but the stuff leading up to it not so much. Some of the Cyberpunk 2077 quests and world-building also get kind of plausible with emotional stakes.

I think that the best way to handle Lou's disappearance was to keep the whole campy "I'm fine" call, but have her mention something totally inocuous like "I'm just having a few drinks with my dad" but have her mention in a previous, totally insignificant conversation that she can't stand alcohol. Something as simple as that, and it shows that not only did Lynx kill her, they are trying to cover it up and fake her continued presence with an artificial voice.

Wasting millions of dollars without a mega corporation knowing happens more often than you would think. In construction alone the amount of waste and misallocation is wild.