And yet a great deal of Kerbal Space Program’s appeal comes from discovering how things work through trial and error, not just remembering tips provided by the game. Tutorials are also a long-running problem, but they’re better now than they’ve ever been and there’s a huge online community to ask help from. Although the original game has always had lots of minor bugs and glitches. Instead, the bigger issue with this port is the amount of slowdown. And although the controls are complicated, with each button performing multiple different functions depending on which other ones are being held down, it’s all perfectly logical and intuitive. And yet, as has frequently been proven in recent years, that’s no obstacle to an adventurous developer. The great difficult for the console version is the controls, with the original being designed purely for a mouse and keyboard. As rockets splutter pathetically a couple of feet away from their launchpads, ships explode in the upper atmosphere, and lander craft pancake onto the moon’s surface failure is a constant companion but also a greater teacher – and often a provider of comic relief.
Inevitably, this means the game is extremely hard to do well at, and yet unlike other games famed for their difficulty most of the time you won’t really care. In fact, the control of spacecraft and astronauts is realistic enough that complex manoeuvres from the real world, such as aerobraking, are a simulated part of the game. We often talk about games having a physics engine, but here almost everything in the game behaves according to Newtonian dynamics.
It does have a welcomingly fun sense of humour, but the science underpinning everything you do is extremely realistic. To look at the cute little Kerbals, who are portrayed as bumbling Minions-like characters, you’d assume all this was some sort of easy going comedy puzzle game but it’s really not. Science mode is a little more structured, in that you have to research more advanced equipment in order to use it, while Career mode places a realistic range of restrictions on funding and forces you to complete pre-set contracts in order to earn money and reputation. There are three game modes in Kerbal Space Program, with sandbox mode allowing you to create any vehicle you want for any mission, with no real punishment for failure.
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