![]() ![]() Instead, players that shell out the $40 to play KSP on PS4 can expect to be greeted by a visually unimpressive, woefully under-optimized product. KSP has had a long time to percolate, having spent the past five years on PC in various forms of beta states and early access on Steam, and has been out in official release since April of 2015, so it’s reasonable to expect by now that a console version in 2016 would reap the performance benefits of all that development. If the steep learning curve and drab, bookish nature of the KSP aren’t enough to give some players pause, the bargain-basement visuals definitely will. In other words, KSP is a game that demands several hours of your time learning how to play it before you even begin to play it in earnest, and much of that learning will be spent reading lots of instructions and deciphering all the different buttons in the game’s various HUDs, rather than doing the actual thing you are learning about. To make things worse, nothing in the Tutorial mode carries over to the Sandbox, Science or Career Modes of the game, including the basic rocket you’re forced to build, but at the same time, leaping straight into one of the latter modes will skip vital tips and make learning how to play the game more difficult. I consider myself to be a smart person, and I found it refreshing that the Kerbal scientists, engineers and astronauts that you encounter both in the tutorial and the game proper come across as truly scientific thinkers that address you more like a peer rather than a total beginner to space travel, but after having to read though what felt like pages and pages of text explaining all the features of the Kerbal Space Center, how to build a rocket and then how to launch it, I felt like I was reading a forklift operation manual from cover to cover and falling asleep. What’s regrettable however is that after spending several weeknights with this PS4 port of this very popular indie game, I have a very strong feeling that few players that give it a try on console if any will ever get far beyond that point.įor starters, one of KSP’s most admirable qualities is also one of the aspects of the game that nearly drove me away after playing it for only a couple of hours-it’s so assured that everyone who plays it is already a part of its core audience that it makes little to no attempt to appeal to anyone that’s not fully on board with the rocket science stuff. I particularly enjoyed observing my skills in rocket-building stumble progressively upward as I gradually evolved from explosive, catastrophic failures and tragic Kerbal casualties to longer and longer periods in flight and ultimately reaching orbit for the first time. ![]() Players can ultimately venture to the “Mun” and other celestial bodies in the solar system, land on their surfaces and explore them with lunar rovers that they’ve built, construct orbital space stations and conduct scientific “experiments” in order to earn financial grants and support further research.Įvery KSP success also increases the experience of one’s crew of astronauts and allows for further expansion of the team, or at the very least the ability to replace the ones who are killed in the many failed launches, landings and other misadventures that players will certainly be witness to as their creations are tested against convincing simulations of real-world physics and structural engineering. ![]() While the main thrust of the game would appear to be primarily about building rockets and other vehicles capable of space flight and launching them into the perilous and unforgiving vacuum of the cosmos, the game actually promises a rather impressive and well-rounded simulation of a real-life space program. ![]() Originally launched in 2011 by indie developer Squad, Kerbal Space Program (KSP) charges players with spearheading a fledgling space program not unlike NASA on a planet not unlike Earth, except that this planet is called Kerbin and is inhabited by an oddly cute race of green humanoids called Kerbals. So it’s understandable that the majority of videogames that involve space travel tend to gloss over its most rudimentary aspects in the interest of fun after all, who wants to be held back from kicking ass and exploring the galaxy as Commander Sheppard in Mass Effect when they don’t know how to execute a proper lift-off sequence from the surface of a planet? Kerbal Space Program dares to be different, however. It will probably still be hard for most regular human beings to wrap their heads around even 50 years from now. Do you ever wonder why people still use that tired old phrase “It’s not rocket science” when they’re trying to explain that something is simple to understand? Well, the short answer is that it’s completely relevant today: rocket science is hard. ![]()
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