Hmmm…this one is on sale today (actually all throughout the Winter Steam Sale I’m sure) - Space Engineers. Looks like it could be fun for me and the boys to play cooperatively. This is what a Reddit user had to say about it that makes me think it could be a fun time together:
"Mileage may vary when it comes to latency, but if you get it working, 2-3 friends can be amazing.
You’ll be flying a landing craft down with your buddies in the passenger seats, while they nervously chatter about your awful piloting skills and shouting in panic when they think you’re about to crash-land, before touching down and marveling at the beauty of a new planet.
You’ll travel across the plains in buggies/hovercraft, marking resource locations and stealing every piece of ore you can find, scoring jackpots and dealing with shortages. Then you’ll double-check your supplies, weight, fuel, and everything before finally making a glorious (hopefully successful) launch back to space with your hard-won prizes.
You’ll be butting heads about space station designs until you come to the agreement on either a collaborative masterwork or a beautiful trainwreck of a thing, and it’ll all go smoothly until someone bumps their welding ship into something important. But at the end of the day, you’ll get to walk in the door of a place you can call home.
You’ll have an unmitigated disaster (possibly on purpose! Crash starts are great) and have to work together to cannibalize and refit your ship to get it airborne/not drifting so you can limp back to base/orbit.
Basically, everything will go wrong and it’ll be great."
So that is a pretty good review. I wonder if we can save our play state and resume later…
@adlabs6, @Rhinosaurus and I played for a bit together. I’m sure others have played Space Engineers too and can comment. The public servers are laggy. Rhino was kind enough to pay for a rented server and it was better. If you’re on a public server, you have to hide your base. There is a possibility of other players coming by, if they happen to find your base and destroy it.
To me, this game would seem tedious and perhaps complicated for younger kids. Others here might offer more opinions.
@BeachAV8R space engineers is great but you’ll want to review some starter guides to get an idea of how to begin. Either that or be prepared to restart a few times. Not a huge thing, but the initial learning curve is moderate.
You should be able to host on an extra computer, but you’ll need to look that one up. As with most server based games, you can host and play and the boys could join. No need for a permanent server host. That being said, they can only run that save when it’s being hosted though. They wouldn’t be able to just jump in.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in space engineers. I’ve got a good amount of time in and only built the one massive ship to break the atmo and go space cruising (with help obv). The boys could also host their own saves with just them that you could drop into when you’re around.
Hey…that is a feature not a bug…! I can just see getting paged out to go fly and come home to find my base has been turned pink and my ships outfitted with LED Christmas lights…
IMO, Space Engineers does have an initial curve just trying to figure out what the heck to do.
But don’t let that put you off… Looking back, those first 2 to 6 hours figuring the game out were some of the most fun play I can remember with Space Engineers. And then once we finally had a decent idea of what we were doing, more fun was had as we got more ambitious, working on a massive space ship which (we hoped) would get us to space.
I built a tiny one-seat rocket that I used to make a few tentative hops up out of the atmosphere, for the first time seeing what awaited us in orbit. Just 5 or 6 minutes out there exploring, then back down on the planet to help labor on the massive ship some more. So much fun.
Luckily we never crashed a ship… so much work to rebuild if we had. But still, we talked about the risks and were pleased to accept the challenge if it came to that.
That sounds like a lot of fun - I love games that reward you in small increments like that. Too many games give away the whole ballgame too early these days…(or you can pay to bypass progress…which doesn’t sound fun at all…)
I went ahead and pulled the trigger on Space Engineers. They have a 4-pack available for $41.99 - so maybe even my wife can become an interior designer of the base…
It’s actually hard to make good size hangars. Air tightness not easy with the hangar bay / airlock doors due to their small size. You’re looking at small utility vehicles for that purpose. We had designed ours to hold two vehicles. I could barely get one through the doors and turned around to dock lol. Definitely some work needed redesigning the small ship. Fun times.
Any thoughts on the original The Crew driving game? I’ve looked at The Crew 2 and it looks…meh…I’m not sure why you need to put airplanes in a driving game. I’m trying to figure out if The Crew 1 has cooperative multiplayer where me and the kids can do stuff together (at least as long as the Ubi servers hold up)…
Ha…I’m actually looking in my Ubi account and I own The Crew. Never really played it though…guess I can give it a whirl before I pick it up for the kids…
