Space Engineers 2 - PC Preview

Space Engineers 2 by developer and publisher KeenSoftware House—PC (Steam)  preview written by Hayden T. with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

---

Keen Software House (Keen) has recently launched Space Engineers 2 (SE2) into early access with a polished communication campaign featuring YouTube influencer previews, snappy teasers and a road map using the ‘vertical slice’ concept to show the intended path between initial early access availability and final release. As with any early access title, and especially with a sequel, potential players need to answer a few key questions:

• Is this game likely to make it to release, or at least a playable state?
• What state is it in right now at early-access launch?
• As a sequel, will it break enough new ground to make it worth buying?
• What can I expect from it as it finishes development?

Is Space Engineers 2 likely to make it to release, or at least a playable state?

The ever-hopeful optimist in me always wants to simply answer ‘yes’ to this question and move on, but this is a question that deserves a serious response. Keen is not a new entrant in the field, and has been operating since 2010.  Space Engineers 2 will be the fourth title the company has produced, and the studio that started with ten people now employs well over 50 staff spread across every continent except the Antarctic.  Accordingly, lets take a look at Keen’s release history and the timeline that products have taken:

 Miner Wars (Miner Wars 2081 / Miner Wars Arena)

Engine: VRAGE

Available pre-alpha October 2010

Steam Greenlight approval October 2012

Full Release November 2012

Always-online requirement for singleplayer removed January 2013

Source code released publicly for modding March 2013. (Asset rights and ownership retained by Keen Software house).

Reception: mixed reviews, 3/10 to 77%.

               First access to release: 2 years

 Space Engineers

          Engine: VRAGE 2

          Steam Early Access (Alpha) October 2013

          Steam Early Access (Beta) December 2016

          Full Release February 2019

          Continued DLC development and free patches through the present (2025)

                     First access to release: 5.5 years

 Medieval Engineers

          Engine: VRAGE 2

          Steam Early Access February 2015

          Development team moved to Space Engineers in February 2019 (end of regular updates) at version 0.7.1

          Full Release March 2020 (version 0.7.2)

          Community patch 0.7.3 officially distributed April 2022.  Community development work continues.

                     First access to release: 4 years

 Space Engineers 2

          Engine: VRAGE 3

          Steam Early Access January 2025

Based on their history then, the answer to whether or not Space Engineers 2 will reach a full release is undoubtedly ‘yes’, as is the case with every product before it. While many in its community were unhappy at the state in which Medieval Engineers was released in 2020, it did get a release. The developer resources from that team that were folded into the Space Engineers group have helped drive that game onward through continued patches, optimizations, improvements and DLC releases for the past five years. Even if one chooses to focus on Medieval Engineers as a weak link in Keen’s development history, the game reached a sufficiently playable state that it developed a community willing to take on continued development by itself and were given the tools by Keen to do so. The chances of Space Engineers 2 becoming abandoned before a playable release therefore seem to be small.

What Space Engineers 1 looked like at its 2013 early access release.

 

What state is it in right now at early-access launch?

As of the start of March 2025, Space Engineers 2 is currently in ‘Vertical Slice 1.0’ and has received a number of updates since its January 27, 2025 initial public early access date. The game is functional as a single player creative sandbox building game, and allows for character and vehicle movement and collisions. Performance on the new VRAGE 3 engine is remarkably smooth for such an apparently early-development game, and at least to me the feel of movement and interaction is noticeably crisper and more responsive than that felt in the VRAGE 2-powered Space Engineers 1.

While the ability to share creations is not yet present in VS1.0, forums and social media platforms have become rife with images and videos of players creations. The available block set in Space Engineers 2 is currently limited, largely comprised of basic block shapes and just enough functional blocks to allow a player to move and control their creation. The survival elements like mining, refining, production and research or progression are not yet available in this iteration of the game - take a look at the roadmap later in the article to see where these elements will start to make an appearance.

In short, Space Engineers 2 at the outset of its Early Access period is already playable, although the single-player state and limited block set limits replayability.

What Space Engineers 1 looks like now in 2025.

As a sequel, will it break enough new ground to make it worth buying?

Based on the roadmap, developer interviews and teasers already released so far, Space Engineers 2 will push the franchise forward by natively incorporating physics-heavy elements that the Space Engineers 1 community has been trying to emulate via modding for quite some time. In addition, Space Engineers 2 promises to move the franchise beyond simply being a sandbox survival-building game with a few narrative scenarios. Instead, players are being sold a future where the game includes a full narrative campaign and overarching lore that serves to flesh out the playing space and give more purpose to the player’s actions and creations. For the moment however, these elements are not yet in the hands of players, and remain largely in the realm of roadmaps and teaser videos.

At the outset of early access, the biggest change that Space Engineers 2 has shown is a vastly improved building system. In the first game, players had to choose whether to place large-scale or small-scale blocks when creating a given vehicle or station (‘grid’), and could not easily mix the block scales. There were ways to do it through the use of physics objects like landing gears or rotos with off-scaled heads, but this was an awkward and imperfect solution. Space Engineers 2 removes that issue from the start, allowing players to mix and match block scales on the same creation.  This is already leading to an explosion in player creativity through the ease of detailing it allows, and by itself marks a large step forward for the many creative players of the franchise.

What Space Engineers 2 looks like at its early access release.

 What can I expect from it as it finishes development?

Keen Software House has presented a fairly polished looking roadmap for Space Engineers 2 that breaks development into ‘vertical slices’ that each represent a major milestone. Within each slice can be multiple smaller releases that add or refine features related to that milestone, with the intent being that work on one milestone is complete before major development on the next takes place. This is a major departure from the way that development ran for Space Engineers 1, where fixes and alterations were happening to multiple major systems simultaneously - and often new feature X would result in bugs or breaking of previously deployed feature Y, which then got patched and resulted in bugs in feature X, etc. etc.

The major elements that Space Engineers 2 promises (and can be seen in the Keen Software house roadmap below) are physics improvements that allow for volumetric water, improved planet generation, improved survival mechanics over the original game, and a full campaign to give life to the sandbox franchise. Community speculation is wild over the exact elements of what these will entail, with lots of ‘they should include X, Y and Z!’ comments visible in various forum spaces. Even just holding to the elements presented in the official roadmap, Space Engineers 2 promises to provide more options on how players interact with the world and much more of a meaningful connection between the world itself and players through developed lore. Gone will be the days where every YouTube channel needs to create its own unique, coherent universal lore in order to tell a story - instead, common elements will be available to anchor their tales for the audience.

Summary

Overall, Space Engineers 2 at the outset of early access presents an immediately playable creative sandbox, backed by a company with 15 years and three games under its belt. The well-defined roadmap speaks to features that will mark a significant step up from the previous game, and developer Keen Software House seems to be approaching development in a much more organized fashion that speaks to lessons learned from previous titles. This won’t be a title that releases with full features a few months after entering early access, but for players who are willing to be patient it promises expanding options and huge potential. If you’re looking for a full-featured game that just needs a little polish before release however, this isn’t the game for you - yet.  For the patient, this looks like a title that will develop if given the time to do so.