Kerbal Space Program - Initial Impressions
Originally published April 2016I suppose I've always had a soft spot for simulation games, though, I wouldn't say that I'm a fan of the genre. I've played my share of SimCity, The Sims, and the Tycoon games, but very few of the simulators that apply math and physics to it, like Train Simulator or Truck Simulator, for instance. The prospect of controlling a bunch of knobs and switches to make a train, a semi-truck, or a tractor run properly has never interested me. One recent simulator game has grabbed my attention, however. Kerbal Space Program is a simulation game that manages to meet halfway between being complicated and being simple, and it manages to give you some challenging and fun goals along the way.
Simulation games are pretty loose with their objectives and typically are without much of a story for you to experience. Any stories that come out of them are usually whatever stories the player can come up with. The point of a simulation game is often just to give a player a physics-filled sandbox and the toys necessary for you to have fun in the sandbox. Kerbal Space Program is the same, except its sandbox isn't limited to a farm filled with tractors, nor is it limited to a highway of semi-trucks. It has an entire solar system in space that you can explore and travel. As for the tools it provides, there are prebuilt ships for you to play with, but part of the fun in Kerbal Space Program is coming up with your own ship designs and seeing what you can get into space with the resources available
Image: Private Division | This solar system is yours to explore. Good luck getting to these other planets
Space-Flight Simulator
There's some legitimate math and physics going on behind the scenes of Kerbal Space Program, as you might expect of a game where the whole point is to get to space and explore it. You have to consider a multitude of factors when trying to come up with a viable vessel for transporting your Kerbal astronauts to space. The aerodynamics, the weight of the ship, how much fuel it has, how many stages the ship has, in what order are the stages, and if there is going to be a return journey are all variables to consider when building your spaceship.
Typically, the first thing you're concerned with is just being able to get the ship off the ground and into controllable flight around the planet. If your ship's weight distribution, its center of gravity, and its thrust are too far off from each other, you'll find out very quickly. The ship will fly in all different directions and smash into the ground, killing your poor pilot. If this all sounds too stressful and daunting, don't worry, you can do over your failures and your pilots can live to fly another day aboard the next murder vessel you construct.
Image: Private Division
If you're worried about the math involved—which can be a legitimate concern for those of us who have tried to leave math behind in our lives—rest assured that the game hides most of that under the hood. Part of the fun of Kerbal Space Program is that, though it's a realistic depiction of the various factors to consider when trying to achieve space flight, you don't have to do the math yourself. Players are free to experiment and build rockets piece by piece and just use the game's nifty icons and tools to figure out the center of gravity, thrust, and lift for ships without needing to get the notebook out and your reference sheet of various equations, and no, you don't need the quadratic formula.
Life Goals
And when you finally do figure out how that stuff all works, the satisfaction of finally making it off the launchpad and into space with a ship that didn't spiral out of control in the process can be euphoric. From there, it's time to set another goal for yourself. Next is to figure out how to get into orbit, and then to the moon. The game itself doesn't really give you these goals, you're more or less in charge of the mission plan and you can accomplish it at your own pace.
There is a campaign mode you can play that gates the creation tools and money necessary to make your dream rocket to add to the challenge and feeling of progress. It also gives you side missions along the way that include the basics like testing various pieces of equipment, taking tourists on a joy ride into space, or just getting into orbit.
Image: Private Division
In terms of the campaign itself, I haven't made it very far, but I have enjoyed the various mechanics of the game that give everything a little more purpose. Money, reputation, and science are all resources necessary to improve your space program. Of the three, the most important is science, because it is the resource you need to unlock new rocket pieces and get further into space. Money is useful, especially for upgrading your base so you can launch heavier, more complicated vessels, but it can be replenished more easily through the side missions, or the perks you can choose from the administration buildings at your space center.
I have found it to be a little tough getting all the resources necessary to progress, however. I was racking up dollars and science real fast in the beginning, but now science and money are much harder to come by. There's a science upgrade tree that you go down to unlock the various pieces, but it takes a long time to accumulate all the points necessary to start getting further into space. The progression can also be tough if you don't choose the correct upgrade path. You can end up backing yourself into a corner in terms of accumulating the resources necessary to upgrade your space center and ship pieces. I certainly feel like that's what's happening to my playthrough at the moment, as I continue to struggle to get my guys into orbit.
Image: Private Division
The campaign is fun, but sometimes, it's just more fun to jump into the sandbox and design something destined for catastrophic failure. With a multitude of different engines, fuel tanks, cockpits, and structural pieces at your disposal, there are seemingly infinite possibilities when it comes to crafting the space-faring vessel of choice. Part of the fun is simply building the heaviest wildest ship you can make and seeing if you can even get it off the ground in a straight line. From that failure, you can go back and tweak your design to find what works and what doesn't until you're finally out of the atmosphere. And you rinse and repeat until you're orbiting the moon, or on your way to a distant planet. It may sound tedious, and it is, but there's a significant amount of satisfaction from the success of launching something that was once a hulking mass of steel and combustible fuel and is now a refined vessel capable of traveling great distances through space. Once you get the hang of the mechanics, you'll have ships going to the moon in no time.
Mechanical Madness
Getting a grasp on the mechanics can be the tough part. The math and physics are there, and thankfully the game doesn't ask you to understand it too much, but that doesn't mean Kerbal Space Program is the simplest game. It manages to simplify one of the most complicated and risky things we, as a species, have ever accomplished. This is a feat in itself, but there are a lot of factors to consider when trying to get your ship to the moon, or at the very least, into space. Unfortunately, the game doesn't do a great job of telling you this information.
Image: Private Division
There are tutorials, and the tutorials are definitely much more helpful than those found in Civilization V, but I still had to play through them multiple times to understand how to properly pilot my ship in space. It also took me a long time to figure out the best placement of wings and thrusters, though I would say I probably still don't know. I only just recently found out how to upgrade my space center in campaign modes so I can launch heavier rockets once they added their new help encyclopedia to the game with the latest update. I might fault the game for a lack of transparency, but it might simply be that I'm just too stupid for this game as well.
Nonetheless, part of the reason I like Kerbal Space Program is because I feel engaged in my design decisions and piloting decisions. For every launch, I have to consider:
When do I start the next stage in my ship's sequence?
Should I disconnect the empty booster engine early to reduce my loss of velocity, or wait till I break through the atmosphere so I don't disrupt the weight distribution?
When do I use full-thrust on the engines instead of just a small amount?
Is the engine I'm using suitable for propulsion through the atmosphere?
Have I designed the ship to be aerodynamic enough that I don't need a pilot?
Will the ship be traveling too fast at the top of the atmosphere and create too much heat?
Image: Private Division
It feels like I'm learning something in every time I launch a rocket. It's definitely not an educational game, since it doesn't give you any data or physical information; you can usually tell if something didn't go right by the fire and explosions. Kerbal Space Program just asks that you play around with the tools they provide and figure it out on your own, and if you have read any of my other game reviews, you know that I tend to enjoy that sort of thing.
Hardware Store
So I've mentioned the whole aspect of using the game's tools to build your rockets multiple times, but I haven't gone into much detail about that process. So let's get technical and look at all the things you can do in the building process.
In the Vehicle Assembly Building of your space center, you first have to choose a command pod. This is where your pilot for the vehicle will sit. There are some command pods that serve as satellites, which don't have room for a pilot, that you can use as well, but piloting them is tougher because while they're in the atmosphere, you can't do much to control the direction the satellite flies, so you'll have to design it to be rather straight and aerodynamic until it makes it into space.
Image: Private Division
Next, you select your fuel and engines. Even in campaign mode with the materials gated off, you start with several options in terms of getting off the ground. Some engines can be controlled manually so you can set the amount of thrust to your liking. Others are boosters, which are always firing at 100% until they use up their fuel and you can't turn them off once they start. Due to this minor detail, and the fact that controlling your ship's flight while an engine is firing at 100% is a little more difficult, you usually want to use these up early in your staging sequence.
Next, you need to add the pieces to make your ship more aerodynamic. Adding fins to the right spot in relation to your center of thrust and gravity is crucial to making sure your rocket can fly in a straight line. The same goes for how a bulky heat shield panel can screw up your rocket's shape and make it difficult to control at high speeds. This, of course, all changes dramatically once you get a ship out of the atmosphere. Wings, panels, and aerodynamics matter very little when there is no wind resistance to consider.
Image: Private Division
You take all the pieces and snap them into place using the designer's click-n-drag interface to make your spaceship. Once you've got your command pod, your fuel, your engines, and your wings set, you have a rocket that's ready to go... somewhere. However, there are still a bunch of other tools available to further adjust your rocket's functions. If you intend on bringing your Kerbal pilots back in one piece, you need to add a parachute to the pod. Maybe you want to add some decouplers so that your ship can break apart into a smaller shape once an engine is used up. You may also need to add heat shields to dissipate the accumulation of heat as your ship rises out of the atmosphere at blistering speeds. If you're playing the campaign, you may need to tack on a few science devices as well to gather more science points during the expedition.
Finally, before you can send your ship to the launchpad to test it out, you need to figure out the staging sequence. The flight controls don't allow you to manipulate and control the various pieces of your ship individually, so if your throttle is set to full, that is all your engines are set to max power. If you build one engine on top of another, having them fire at the same time will lead to some catastrophic results. Thus, you need to separate the precious moments when engines fire, when pieces decouple, and when parachutes open into stages. When you've figured all that out, you can finally take it to the launchpad to watch it crash and burn, whereupon you can go back to the drawing board and further edit your design until you get it right.
Image: Private Division
Initial Impression
Kerbal Space Program is a thinking game. You have to consider many variables and factors that affect your rocket's ability to get to space and then consider even more once you get there. It's a tedious game that requires patience and thought to get things right, similar to how one might construct a miniature rocket from a toy store and launch it from a schoolyard, then gather the pieces when it comes crashing back down. However, KSP gives players the tools to experiment and design a ship to their liking over and over again without having to pick up the pieces. It even gives players goals beyond simply getting the ship to fly. There's not much here for the player who wants an involved, action-packed experience, but for the player who's looking for a video game that captures the essence of crafting a toy rocket and the achievement of going to the moon, Kerbal Space Program is worth the thought, the time, and the money.