Cut derelict spaceships into spare parts in Hardspace: Shipbreaker

Blackbird Interactive, developer of Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, have announced a new game. It's called Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and you play as a Cutter: a blue-collar worker at a space station orbiting earth where you slice up derelict spaceships into spare parts. It's planned for a Steam Early Access launch this summer, and you can check out the announcement trailer above.

"With true-to-life physics and demolition effects, a sandbox of creative destruction lies before you this Summer on Steam Early Access," says Blackbird Interactive and Hardspace: Shipbreaker's publisher, Focus Home Interactive.

"Early Access will launch with many features to discover, 2 classes of spaceship to salvage, multiple upgradable salvaging tools and perks, and the first act of the story campaign. Over the course of the Early Access period, we are committed to releasing more spaceship classes, missions, daily challenges, leaderboards, modding support and much more with the help of the Steam Early Access community."

As you can see from the trailer, slicing up decommissioned spaceships with a plasma cutter while floating in zero G comes with a fairly high risk factor—and I can attest to that personally. I was lucky enough to try out a demo of Hardspace: Shipbreaker last week, and here's some hands-on video and thoughts about the game.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.