Hardspace: Shipbreaker's new update revamps its story and tutorial
All-new voiced characters to meet in space
Hardspace: Shipbreaker sits you in front of a moist gateau and hands you a cake slice, only the gateau is a stylish spaceship and the cake slice is a metal-severing laser. It's immediately compelling, as you cut into your rich dessert to extract its delicious insides without accidentally slicing a cherry. In this metaphor, the cherries are explosives.
After a while, I found its early access release got a little lonely and a little samey, but that might have changed with today's "Salvage Your Future" update. It revamps Shipbreaker's campaign and introduces four new voiced characters.
I loved Hardspace: Shipbreaker when I played it last year, but held off on celebrating it in our end-of-year lists because it felt like it would only get better with more time in development. Today's update is basically vindication of me and my opinions, in other words.
The revised campaign introduces act 1 of a proper story, in which you'll be guided via a new tutorial, advance from ranks 1 to 7, and meet and interact with fellow shipbreakers. They're all voiced, although currently the voice acting is placeholder work done by internal developers, and they'll be replaced by professionals in a future update.
You can read the update's full list of changes but there are also changes to difficulty, how objectives are structured, early game ship variety (aka the "sameyness" I mentioned above), a HUD revamp and a lot more.
If you've not played Hardspace at all, I recommend it heartily. Also Sin recommended it heartily. But as someone who has played it, I'm going to wait until it hits 1.0 before I go back for more.