Space Engineers 2 - PC Preview (2025)

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

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

KeenSoftware House (Keen) has recently launched Space Engineers 2 (SE2) into earlyaccess with a polished communication campaign featuring YouTube influencerpreviews, snappy teasers and a road map using the ‘vertical slice’ concept toshow the intended path between initial early access availability and finalrelease. As with any early access title, and especially with a sequel, potentialplayers need to answer a few key questions:

Whatstate is it in right now at early-access launch?

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

While theability to share creations is not yet present in VS1.0, forums and social mediaplatforms have become rife with images and videos of players creations. Theavailable block set in Space Engineers 2 is currently limited, largelycomprised of basic block shapes and just enough functional blocks to allow aplayer to move and control their creation. The survival elements like mining,refining, production and research or progression are not yet available in thisiteration of the game - take a look at the roadmap later in the article to seewhere 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 asequel, will it break enough new ground to make it worth buying?

Based on theroadmap, developer interviews and teasers already released so far, SpaceEngineers 2 will push the franchise forward by natively incorporatingphysics-heavy elements that the Space Engineers 1 community has been trying toemulate via modding for quite some time. In addition, Space Engineers 2promises to move the franchise beyond simply being a sandbox survival-buildinggame with a few narrative scenarios. Instead, players are being sold a futurewhere the game includes a full narrative campaign and overarching lore thatserves to flesh out the playing space and give more purpose to the player’sactions and creations. For the moment however, these elements are not yet inthe hands of players, and remain largely in the realm of roadmaps and teaservideos.

At theoutset of early access, the biggest change that Space Engineers 2 has shown isa vastly improved building system. Inthe first game, players had to choose whether to place large-scale orsmall-scale blocks when creating a given vehicle or station (‘grid’), and couldnot easily mix the block scales. Therewere ways to do it through the use of physics objects like landing gears orrotos with off-scaled heads, but this was an awkward and imperfectsolution. Space Engineers 2 removes thatissue from the start, allowing players to mix and match block scales on thesame creation. This is already leadingto 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 thefranchise.

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

What canI expect from it as it finishes development?

KeenSoftware House has presented a fairly polished looking roadmap for SpaceEngineers 2 that breaks development into ‘vertical slices’ that each representa major milestone. Within each slice can be multiple smaller releases that addor refine features related to that milestone, with the intent being that workon 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 Engineers1, where fixes and alterations were happening to multiple major systemssimultaneously - and often new feature X would result in bugs or breaking ofpreviously deployed feature Y, which then got patched and resulted in bugs infeature X, etc. etc.

The majorelements that Space Engineers 2 promises (and can be seen in the Keen Softwarehouse 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. Communityspeculation is wild over the exact elements of what these will entail, withlots of ‘they should include X, Y and Z!’ comments visible in various forumspaces. Even just holding to the elements presented in the official roadmap,Space Engineers 2 promises to provide more options on how players interact withthe world and much more of a meaningful connection between the world itself andplayers through developed lore. Gone will be the days where every YouTubechannel needs to create its own unique, coherent universal lore in order totell a story - instead, common elements will be available to anchor their talesfor the audience.

Summary

Overall,Space Engineers 2 at the outset of early access presents an immediatelyplayable creative sandbox, backed by a company with 15 years and three gamesunder its belt. The well-defined roadmap speaks to features that will mark asignificant step up from the previous game, and developer Keen Software Houseseems to be approaching development in a much more organized fashion thatspeaks to lessons learned from previous titles. This won’t be a title thatreleases with full features a few months after entering early access, but forplayers who are willing to be patient it promises expanding options and hugepotential. If you’re looking for afull-featured game that just needs a little polish before release however, thisisn’t the game for you - yet. For thepatient, this looks like a title that will develop if given the time to doso.