Ey, bro, wanna join a pre-alpha release that barely works and is full of bugs and missing features? Heck yeah, man! Count me in! Not only will I report those bugs, I will freaking roast them and everything that's wrong with the game on top of that!

So where do we start? The crappy controls? The hangar doors that slam in your face when you try to dock? How about the awful time everyone is having trying to find silicon for the first building on their planet plots that don't even show up correctly in the interface yet? Nah. I think I'll start with the fact that this blockchain space game isn't even connected to a blockchain yet! Okay, yeah, I get it. It's pre-alpha, but that seems like the next thing you should do after selecting an engine.

Oh, speaking of engines, they actually used a decent one. Unreal Engine 4. You know, the one that freaking Fortnite uses. But hey, they didn't use that memory-unsafe hot mess of awkward garbage known as Unity. Seriously, when the best thing about your engine is that it uses Microsuck's .net framework for scripting, you've got some problems. There are some good indie games made in spite of it, but Unity itself is trash. Get that crap outta here. With a full set of tools out of the box and its own visual scripting language PLUS C++ scripting for when you really need it, Unreal is the real deal. Pun intended. Terrible pun that only halfway works - also intended. Dwelling on how bad it is even though the joke sucked in the first place and is terribly stale by this point - also intended. And no, Epic doesn't give me money to shill UE4. (They should though.) They just give me an awesome free-for-the-first-million-bucks-of-revenue game engine that I still haven't learned to use because I'm a horrible procrastinator who should probably be job hunting instead of blogging about glitchy games.

So SpaceEx uses UE4. That's the one thing done right so far. On the other hand, the pre-alpha gameplay grinds like two millstones, except it's asteroids instead of millstones, and random elements instead of grain. You spend a few months in a star system building a base so you can build a more powerful ship and move on to the next sector when it's released, then you move on and do the same thing over again. During the building process, you just sit around for hours mining, ship stuff back to base, and then do it some more. There's no interaction during the hours-long mining process, so you end up leaving this fancy UE4 game running in the background while you do something that's actually interesting, like writing sarcastic blogs. If I wanted to waste electricity running something in the background, I'd be mining some random crapcoin on my GPU in hopes the price goes to the moon and makes me an overnight millionaire someday. But no. I've got UE4 running in the background slowly mining ore in a glitchy, grindy pre-alpha game so I can write sarcastic reviews in hopes of amusing and enlightening bored internet people.

Did I mention this is pre-alpha? Because it's pre-alpha. There's plenty of room to improve because, once again, this is pre-alpha. Practically nothing works yet. Players can log in and shoot beams at rocks to grind for ore. They're testing the engine and the netcode and that sort of stuff to see what breaks, and a lot of stuff is broken, as expected, because it's pre-alpha and stuff is supposed to be broken! Do I need to ramble about this any more? It's pre-alpha. It's not even alpha yet. Alpha, as in "before beta." Beta as in "not finished." It's before what comes before "not finished."

So it's glitchy. They'll fix the bugs. It's grindy. They'll add gameplay - I hope. That's where this game could fall flat on its face. Gameplay needs enrichment, and I don't just mean selling your in-game stuff for crypto and getting rich over night. I mean interesting, nuanced gameplay beyond grinding rocks. I'm sure base building will add a lot to the overall strategy of the game, and things will get more interesting when you can buy and sell resources on the in-game market, but those things on their own won't solve a grindy, repetitive, AFK gameplay loop. If that's all you've got, why should the player put in the effort to fly the ship? Just select a task and let the thing run on its own instead of bothering players to do something that's just going to be AFK'd anyway because it only requires interaction every couple of hours.

Apparently, later in development you'll be able to use the scanner to actually search for new planets, and presumably it will work on asteroids too. Depending on how the mechanics work, that could be interesting. Right now though, the asteroid scanning is horrible to use and you can't even search for new planets. Well, go figure. Again, this is PRE-alpha. It's before alpha. That said, if the exploration mechanics aren't interesting enough, or all the planets are discovered too fast so you can't actually do any exploration, the game will fall flat on its face. We'll just have to wait and see whether or not they get the old exploration treasure hunt formula working.

For now, what you see is what you get. If you want to start mining resources and money early, go for it. If you're expecting something that's actually playable without relying on a very loose definition of "play" that doesn't require fun, look elsewhere and check back when development is further down the line. For now, since it's pre-alpha, we don't have SpaceEx-ploration. We have SpaceEx-treme Grind.