Nostalgic Monday | Kerbal Space Program

This is one of those games I was hoping I could get into back in the day. I’m quite a nerd and I love things involving space. I thought it would be fun flying Kerbal into space and doing a bunch of other things. I ended up playing less than 30 hours before I got bored with it. To this day I’ve wanted to return but never had the excuses till this week.

I must say right off the bat this game did not age well from a graphics standpoint. Despite the fact, they are working on updates to add “high quality” textures to the game. Which I’m almost willing to argue in some instances looks worse than the older stuff.

This is just one of those types of games where you start adding in some realism and whatever fun you thought it would be at least for me evaporated. You would have things like dealing with at least from a game point of view gravity and other mechanics like having limited capacity on fuel. This resulted in you failing quite often and frequently.

Even this time around I mostly just wanted to see failed ship designs explode after making an impact with the ground. While I know you can and people have done a heck of a lot more with this game. The destroy in me was not so interested in having my Kerbals lost in space as I was having to find replacements.

Not to mention you had to practice trying to get the rocket you created into orbit. That was such a struggle for people back in the day I recall someone made a mod that a lot of people used. I never gave it a go myself as I found the rocket tumbling around on the screen and not getting the correct trajectory to be a major part of the game.

That however got old after a while. Even more so when the rockets I would build got more complex and even harder to keep upright the way I wanted them. After a while, I just lost interest as there are only so many times you can enjoy things blowing up in space and playing around with different rocket builds.

Nowadays there are a bunch of fancy features to try and keep you busy while also slowing down the gameplay. You have things like research and development, a deeper mission system, lots of objects like moons to fly out into, and different game modes. Far from when the game was bare bones and it was just a go and do what you wanted.

That however was not something I cared about. For whatever reason every time I fired up this game I just felt that feeling of frustration. While the game seems a bit easier to fly rockets now and they have made a lot of changes.

Just trying to find the right buttons somewhere on the screen to do what you want to do seems to be the new challenge. The game now has this massive manual in it trying to help the player out to the point I just don’t have time to get into a game like this.

Final Thought

This was quite a short one and not that great. I always wanted excess to return and now I can’t wait to uninstall it. Sometimes games are just better left in the past where whatever fun memories you had of it should remain unaltered.