YMMV / Hardspace: Shipbreaker

• Awesome Music: Hands down the most beloved part of the game is the soundtrack, composed entirely of Alternative Country tracks, it sounds so unlike normal video game soundtracks and emphasizes the feeling of blue-collar work on the frontier.
• Catharsis Factor:
  • Managing to finish a complicated ship in a single shift or surviving a brush with disaster tends to evoke this.
  • The Industrial Action "salvage" is pure catharsis. Taking everything you've learned to do properly to dismantle a ship and doing the exact opposite while Hal impotently rages at you is a fun finale. Even when he tries to shut off your suit, it barely even makes a dent in your momentum in screwing with him.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: With how much faster it works compared to the stinger, it isn't uncommon for players to use the splitsaw to take out structural studs throughout a ship early on, even removing multiple at once with the right angles. Indeed, such is its effectiveness that swapping back to the stinger for precision often seems unintuitive at first glance. It's even encouraged in regards to higher level cut points that take forever for the stinger to melt, such as those holding armor plates and fuel tanks, with markings indicating that the splitsaw is a better choice. With the splitsaw, you just aim and it will slice it in half all the way through with no problem whatsoever. Just be mindful of what's behind, of course. Using the splitsaw willy-nilly will get you killed on higher-hazard ships. In addition, unlike the splitsaw, the stinger can vaporize an entire piece of material at once, such as when trying to remove the aluminum fitting around an air filter or the cut point of a rad filter.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • The Light Cargo and Passenger versions of the Mackerel are simple compared to the Exolab version. Though the latter's internal layout is mostly the same, it has a large number of power cells as well as a huge amount of electronic lab equipment inside, along with cables that need to be cut. Bumping or damaging any of this fragile equipment while extracting it can rapidly cause a massive electrical chain reaction that can destroy millions of credits in salvage and, if electric wires are involved, turn the whole place into a corridor of death.
  • The jump from the standard Mackerel to the larger variant is fairly tame, since the only difference is slightly increased size and a more complex thruster assembly. The Gecko, on the other hand, is huge. You're required to decompress multiple rooms, the Class II reactor requires a much more complex disassembly process, the hull sections are larger and require additional tethers to get them moving, and it's a bigger time sink in general. The large versions of the Javelin are even bigger, stretching the entire length of the bay, and in the case of the Heavy Cargo Javelin can be a nightmare to strip down (the Refueling Javelin, by comparison, is fairly simple).
  • The various classes of Atlas ships come with a major difficulty jump with their enormous engines. The only way to access their interior is to disconnect the nozzle on the back and then use the laser on the cut points connecting the thrusters to the fuel lines, which will start a fire that you have to quickly fly through to reach the cutoff valve. If you're too slow, the entire engine will explode with you inside. You can mitigate the risk by using coolant to freeze the lines, and there are coolant bottles on the engine to facilitate this, but you have to have unlocked coolant as a hazard and aiming the coolant takes a bit of practice.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: As SsethTzeentach put it best in his review of the game:
  "So, we've established that this system is basically unfixable, right? So, how do they fix it? Well, the middle managers get demoted, LYNX deletes the fucking slavery clause from their contracts, Space Congress outlaws cloning machines, but the Shipbreakers Union specifically lobbies to keep their cloning machines. And everyone responsible gets off scott free, and continue to profit from the situation. The society has not changed. The working conditions are exactly the same. And literally nothing has been done to keep humanity out of the ever-grinding cogs of industry. But, yay! Good Job! You did it! Or, I mean, you didn't do it, you're fucking dead. Your clone did it. Moral of the story I guess: Workers are expendable, the human soul is replaceable, and it's morally correct to enslave people, just don't actually use the S-word."
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: Some critics have mentioned that the process of dismantling ships becomes too repetitive after many shifts, while the amount of hazards and the costs of a mistake keep rising. They were disappointed the gameplay wasn't as relaxing as they've expected, but gave praise to the message about why large corporations need unions and worker rights. This opinion is notably inverted with the playerbase, who find the story obstructive and annoying (even when they agree with the message) and see it as getting in the way of the gameplay.
• Fanon Welding: Due to very similiar themes, a lot of fans tend to assume this game and The Outer Worlds happen in the same universe, just in different star systems.
• Good Bad Bugs: While you cannot apply force to objects that are too heavy to move with your grapple, objects can apply force to each other regardless of relative size. This can be problematic at times, such as a loose forklift moving an entire Mackarel during decompression. What it also does is let you move huge pieces of hull by dragging them with a smaller object you've grappled. For example, the rear engine housing of the Gecko is usually too heavy for the grapple to move and can even resist tethers if the three pieces are connected, but you can cut off a thruster cap, wedge it in a corner, and pull the entire thing toward the processor about as fast as the tethers can. It's also a handy trick for moving the stripped aluminum innards of a Gecko into the furnace without having to splitsaw it into smaller pieces; the amount of material you save is minimal, but it does feel pretty satisfying to watch that aluminum get smelted all at once.
• Play the Game, Skip the Story: Many players expressed that the story is poorly written and unnecessary, and wished the development instead focused on adding more ship types, or at least gave the option to skip the morning briefings. The common opinions about the plot call it being far too Anvilicious, with the player having no influence in it (even if you continue doing your job during Industrial Action, aside a few verbal nods, it still plays out the same), nor finishing the campaign changes anything in gameplay.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The furnace melts down everything sent into it, but several furnace objects will be destroyed and considered scrap if you damage them, even though the furnace will cause the same damage to them intentionally as you can by mistake, making earning any associated stickers that much harder. This hits especially hard with food items and cables, being the most fragile and limited item types.
  • The gravity effect of the furnace and processor draw in salvage once they're passed the threshold, a mostly helpful feature that lets you tether and ignore salvage. However, when dealing with larger vessels, especially the Geckos, the former becomes a salvage-devouring monster that will happily grab huge sections of hull you were trying to get into the processor. This most often happens with the engine housing at the rear of the vessel, as its mass and positioning puts it perilously close to the furnace on spawn. Players often just leave it alone until they've salvaged the rest of the vessel, so the parts can be tethered safely forward until they're clear of the furnace and can be sent straight into the processor. It's also a nightmare when dealing with the two halves the Quasar engines, which have a tendency to get caught in the furnace gravity while being drawn into the processor, pinning it to the side wall and becoming nearly impossible to dislodge. Unless your grapple is strong enough to move the entire thing unassisted, getting it unstuck is a nightmare.
  • The Hazard Level mechanic works by adding a percent chance for some (but not all) Atmospheric Regulators to spawn broken, which forces the player to decompress rooms unsafely. This turns loose salvage into dangerous projectiles, which is particularly bad with the Salvage Gecko as noted below. The workaround is to store/evacuate loose salvage using the airlock or a room with a working regulator, but depending on the ship type and location of the regulator/airlock, this can range from moving a few crates to spending half a shift clearing out an entire cargo bay.
  • Demo charges are used to destroy reinforced cut points. This is fine by itself, but it becomes a serious problem when fuel tanks are mixed in. Standard demo charges will destroy any nearby fuel tanks, and the mid-range Fuel Javelin and all models of Cargo Javelin come with large fuel tanks held right next to the cut points. If you don't want to lose the tanks, you have to bypass the cut points entirely by melting the aluminum frame, a waste of both time and material. This goes double for the Fuel Javelins, because the triple fuel tanks are nearly impossible to remove without unintuitive blasting of the external frame. It isn't until you've managed to purchase two reduced blast radius upgrades that the demo charges stop being a problem in those situations, and it takes several additional ranks to unlock those features.
  • One of the biggest complaints about the game is the lack of a skip button for dialogue sequences, especially for players who find the story unengaging. Not helping matters is that these sequences near-completely disables any interactivity with your hab, meaning you can't even upgrade your tools or check your terminal until the cutscene ends and the next shift begins - all you can do is listen for minutes on end.
• That One Achievement:
  • There are stickers for sending 100 food packets and 100 drink bottles into the furnace. This is incredibly tedious because these items are very limited, around 10 at most depending on the ship, requiring multiple salvage runs just to get one normal sticker, much less the shiny holographic ones.
  • Salvaging electrical cables is problematic for similar reasons. The goal is 30,000, but only two ship models possess wiring and not in large amounts. Though wiring isn't as fragile as food and drink, it's almost as annoying to toss into the furnace because it has to be separated into many small fragments first.
• That One Level: The Salvage Runner Gecko is universally hated for a number of reasons, all of which relate to either poor design decisions or bugs. As the name implies, its cargo hold is full of random salvage. This can include fuel/coolant tanks, thrusters, and other explosive things. The cargo hold is designed in such a way that it shares an atmospheric connection with the crawlspace, is right next to the reactor (and its myriad pipes full of fuel/coolant), and is isolated by the ship's airlock. Any explosive decompression will cause a chain reaction of destruction, reducing the rear end of the ship to scrap. At higher hazard levels, the single atmospheric regulator in that section can spawn broken, meaning you have to spend most of that shift sequestering volatile salvage in the airlock just to be able to safely decompress the ship, and that isn't an option if you're unlucky enough to have an entire ECU spawn in the cargo area. Once you reach Hazard Level 9, it's simply not worth playing the ship in favor of more stable alternatives. To add insult to injury, it has a lot more internal walls, which makes separating the hull into movable pieces that much harder. This is even acknowledged in-universe during the post-game, where Deedee is kicking herself for taking one in the first place, only able to guess that she wanted to punish herself that day. When Kaito says he thinks they're fun, she pops off complaining that they're an absolute death trap to take apart and that's before getting to all the salvage they're carrying which, if a cutter is lucky, is just twisted scrap. Unlucky cutters, on the other hand, might find rusty fuel barrels or leaking rad filters. Kaito rethinks his stance after Deedee's rant.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A significant portion of the playerbase feel that exploring the A.I.s and especially the "Machine God" would have made for a much more interesting main plot than the anti-corporate one.

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