Recent reviews by RobertCheechmen

**********Copied From TheLighterDark - i stand with his position and the position of the rest of the community.

With today's announcement that Take-Two has laid off the entirety of Intercept Games (confirmed per Bloomberg), I'll finally write my review, which is something I had held off doing until my last drop of hope evaporated. KSP2's development was not as controversial as many online would have you believe, especially compared to more scandalous ones, but for me it is by far the most disappointed I've ever been with a video game.

KSP2 was announced in August of 2019 at Gamescon, slated to release in 2020 by Star Theory Games, formerly known as Uber Entertainment. Wikipedia states:

"For various reasons, the release date was pushed back to Q3 2021."

This is a really funny sentence to me in 2024, knowing that the early access (EA) release would not be coming until a year and a half after that date. During this time, Take-Two established a new studio under Private Division called Intercept Games, poaching a dozen employees from Star Theory, including creative director Nate Simpson and lead producer Nate Robinson. The game would continue a long string of announced delays with little communication and progress updates in between, foreshadowing what was to come. Finally, in October of 2022, an early access release date of February 24, 2023 was announced. The date was, for once, one Intercept Games would stick to. Along with this announcement came a road map of major features for future updates, which outlined the following: early access, science, colonies, interstellar, exploration, and multiplayer, to be release chronologically over an unrevealed timeline. The hype that had died down over the years was [mostly] restored, and Intercept Games had bitten off more than they could chew.

Before I get into the release, I want backtrack a bit and have everyone watch the Cinematic Announcement Trailer that was released 4 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_nj6wW6Gsc&

Who is responsible for this? It is by far the best game trailer I've ever seen. It EMBODIES what players love about Kerbal Space Program: the mystique of other worlds, the scale of space, the clumsiness of Kerbals, and the drive we have to succeed after failure. The latter two quite literally embody the Kerbal way, as anyone from KSP1 who has stranded their loyal astronauts on Duna or straight up murdered them on the launchpad can confirm. If you were involved in any way with this trailer, give yourself a huge pat on the back. It may very well be the only good thing Intercept Games ever accomplished.

Two weeks before the early access release, ESA held a preview event where content creators could play the game for a few hours. Many of these content creators recording themselves playing and something seemed, well, off. You can see it in their eyes and the way they talk about the game. The very framework which would support every roadmap feature was not built on solid ground.

Two weeks later, early access was released. I recall some buzzing in the discord in the days before release about the frame rate, but Intercept has a history of being proactive with the ban hammer and anyone who commented these things was swiftly removed. Forced positivity was the subterfuge they needed to convince themselves that what was about to release was worth a fraction of the resources that had supposedly been poured into it. To cut a long story short, release day was a complete and utter disaster. Performance was abymsal with many high end systems topping out at 15 FPS, crafts were wonky and not in the "Kerbal" way, anti-aliasing looked jagged, maneuver nodes were busted (if you could even manage to get to space in the first place), no reentry heating, and an unlimited number of other failures all reared their ugly heads. Even the tutorials themselves didn't feel like KSP. Wrap all those mistakes into a $50 price tag and it's not hard to see why KSP2's player count dipped below KSP1 within days of launch. I'm not going to pretend like I stuck it out and spent my time troubleshooting and reporting bugs to make the game better. I did what any sensible person would do and asked Steam for a refund.

The period that followed went as you would aspect: poor damage control. Intercept gaslighted their fan base and ruled with an iron first on their forums and Discord server. Nate occasionally posted updates on their forums, filled with so much technical jargon it made reading them a bigger chore than booting up the game itself. Other than that, there was a lot of radio silence. I encourage everyone to give this website a whirl, which displays the scale of our solar system if the Moon was only 1 pixel:

https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html

While you're scrolling, imagine each planet is an update given by Nate on the development of KSP2. The analogy works. Trust me.

In October of 2023, Nate gave a speech at Space Creator Day, in which he outlined some of KSP2's development problems before announcing the first roadmap update, For Science!, which ended up releasing in December of 2023. Performance had improved throughout 2023, and For Science! would give players objectives to work towards, but many of the release day issues remained unsolved, and many questions were still unanswered, like:

How could a planned release date of 2020 be delayed three years into a rushed EA release?
Why did you double down on Unity knowing the same limitations would still be there?
And ten thousand others you can scour the Internet for in your free time.

While you do that, let me end with this final truth: Kerbal Space Program [1] is spectacular. It feels unique, quirky, works, and had tremendous community support. Games in this position are invaluable, and very hard to follow up with worthy successors. Cities: Skylines 2 and Roller Coaster Tycoon World are more recent examples of games that, by and large, failed to recapture any of what made their predecessors unique. Even at its best, which it rarely ever was, KSP2 never felt like KSP1. Sid Meier once said his design philosophy for designing and creating his games is to "play them, over and over, until they are fun." It's clear that Meier's wisdom never carried over to Nate and the KSP2 team, since anyone who played it never had fun. Such is the early access fate, and shame on all of us for buying into it again. No lessons will be learned and will all be stewing in our anger in a few months at the next major letdown.

Kerbal Space Program 2 set its sights on the stars. Unfortunately, it sits abandoned at the launch site, having never even taken flight.

i really enjoyed this game, played it all the way through and made my own country. its not exactly mount and blade but its pretty damn close.

Where we going squad lead? Over
Whats the plan squad lead? Over
Im With Squad Lead!!!! Over!
Squad Lead Im Dead Over!

1800+ and still playing, what a great game.

9/10 1 point off for a bad anti-cheat system might update review if this changes

amazing game islands need to be bigger more trees and storage containers would help alot a motor attachment would be cool on the plastic float more inventory!! 10/10

Jizz Tastic