➤ A space trip 🎮

"This is a small step for a man but a big step for Humanity". We have all seen at least once the film of Neil Armstrong, the first man to have set foot on the Moon, in 1969, who utters one of the most famous and significant phrases in history and we dreamed of traveling in space to unknown worlds. Felipe Falanghe, a Team Squad employee who until four years ago was in charge of marketing management for the development of interactive technologies and multimedia creations in Mexico City certainly had this dream since he was a child. Felipe was however too stressed from his job and was about to resign when he was asked, before leaving, what he wanted to do in life and he replied that he wanted to create a video game: he did not believe his ears when his bosses told him to show their idea and Felipe, now the lead designer of Kerball Space Program, came up with a project he had had since he was a boy when, in his hometown Brazil, together with his friends he created small tin toy men, which he called Kerbal. trying to launch them into space aboard rudimentary fireworks. Team Squad supported Felipe's project and, seven months later, Kerbal Space Program was made available in alpha on Steam: right from the start it was understood that we were faced with a brilliant game, with enormous potential and after four years of development and an ever-growing community in support, it is with great emotion and transport that we are going to share this product, unique of its kind, with you.

Kerball Space Program is finally available in its full version!

What is Kerbal Space Program?

This is without doubt the most accurate and fun space simulation ever created; you can build rockets, launch them into space and explore the immense planetary system around the Sun: this includes landings on unexplored planets and collecting scientific data by staying in orbit around them or on their surface. The center of your action, where the main buildings from which you will plan both the construction of the rockets and the flights are located, is the planet Kerbin, Earth's counterpart with similar physical conformations, even if the continents are arranged differently. This planet is inhabited by the Kerbal, a funny race of humanoids among which the Kerbonauts stand out, heroes who will contribute, depending on whether they are pilots, engineers, scientists or space tourists, to your purpose which will be to help them achieve their goals of research and development and to guide them on their interplanetary journeys.

There are three game modes: the sandbox that will allow you to build any rocket or plane without any kind of limitation or negative consequence for failure; the science mode, much more structured, which will allow you to access the various rocket technologies through experimentation; the career mode that will put you in the stakes linked to the economic field. Here, in fact, to progress in space exploration, you will be bound to the completion of contracts to raise funds and to gain reputation as well as science points useful as much as in the second aforementioned mode. At a first observation, these little humanoids, resembling the minions of "Despicable Me", might suggest a simple and demented game but Kerbal Space Program is not at all and the physics that regulates it is the most realistic that can be found in a video game, so much so that even Newton would applaud the application of its rules, for example, when our vehicle is captured by the gravity of a moon or a planet and is at the right distance or when it is necessary to aero-brake (exploit the friction of the air in the atmosphere to slow the spacecraft). Before going on to describe the three modes in detail, we recommend that you all familiarize yourself with the basics of the game through the tutorials present: the simplest will allow you to learn how to build rockets, to use the flight controls, to understand the operation of the Navball and to put your rocket in orbit; while the more complex ones will try to teach you how to perform more complicated maneuvers such as "docking" (the docking of two ships that are orbiting at different speeds, just as happens with the Soyouz shuttle when it brings supplies or new crew to the International Space Base ).

Space for creativity

In the Sandbox you will unleash your fantasy without worrying about any consequences, all the buildings are at the highest level (i.e. completely built) and the money and science points are not present, thus having full access to all the parts to build our rocket, to where you just need to enter the Vehicle Assembly Building where you will have a list of useful components divided by category: the capsules for the crew, the fuel tanks, the engines, the on-board computers, the structural parts to keep everything together, the aerodynamic components such as ailerons or heat shields, scientific instrumentation and various utilities such as ladders to get off the rocket or parachutes.

Assembling the pieces is very simple and the modular editor will allow you to virtually join any piece to another; you can start, even using intuition alone, with something vaguely shaped like a rocket. You can rotate, multiply and mount any piece symmetrically, attaching it to another already present, using the "drag and drop" interface with the pieces that will change their brightness when they are attached correctly. As soon as you feel ready, click on the launch button and your creation will be moved to the external platform. At this point you will stop being engineers and you will become pilots ready to launch: pay attention to the interface of the sequence of actions, as it will depend on the order of the ignition of the engines, the detachment of the parts and the opening of the parachute. Have you accidentally opened the parachute along with the second stage of the rocket and now everything is spinning? No problem, you can go back to launch, rearrange the order of actions and start over. Did you forget to put your parachute on (er, let's avoid drinking before launch)? Go back to the moment before the transport to the launch pad, add it and try again. Whether it is a success or a failure, depending on how the flight went, you will understand what changes to apply and what improvements to make: if you have not managed to reach 70.000 meters useful for a suborbital flight, perhaps you need a more powerful engine ; if on the first attempt to turn, the rocket went upside down, you will need to better adjust the ailerons or add thrusters to maneuver more accurately. From here on, despite the limitless structure typical of the sandbox, you will have an entire planetary system to explore starting from Mun, the first moon of Kerbin, to the most distant and difficult to reach planets.; you won't be forced to do this, but it will give you a sense of progression even within this modality. Finally, it must be said that the world in which Kerbal Space Program takes place is persistent, in the sense that for example you can easily build a space base along the lines of the ISS around the planet Duna (counterpart of Mars) and leave it there as a station. similarly, if you left an astronaut on Mun because you ran out of fuel to leave, he'll stay there until someone goes to rescue him (the Kerbal don't die a natural death).

A little more attention

Also in the Science mode you will have access to every building at the highest level and the money will not be present, however, the parts available to you to build the spaceship will be limited and to get them you will have to progress in the science tree available in the Research and Developent Building: here you can also consult all the information collected during the experiments on your travels.

Getting science points is very satisfying and will give you the feeling of discovering, little by little, every phenomenon present in the immense system of Kerbal Space Program. For example, we pass from the simple observation, by the kerbonauts, of the landscape that surrounds them, both remaining inside the capsule and letting them go out for an EVA (extra vehicular activity) during the flight or after landing on the surface of moons or planets. . You can also equip your vehicle with scientific instruments, such as thermometers, barometers, scanners, to find out what materials are present on the ground. Each of these data collections will give you science points and they will be useful for unlocking more and more technologies. To "bring home" these collected data, you can transmit them on Kerbin through the radio antenna that you will mount on the spacecraft (this will make you lose part of the collected data) or you will write them down but, in this case, you will have to bring the instrumentation back safely to Earth. If this is not possible, you can manually collect the data of these instruments with a Kerbonaut EVA, transport them in the crew capsule and then unhook the instrumentation before the atmospheric reentry.

Space is serious business

The Career mode, whose difficulty can be changed from easy to difficult by altering variables such as the money available at the beginning of the game or the possibility or not of returning to the moment of the launch in case of failure, you will be dealing with a real and its own simulation of a space organization such as NASA or ESA. All buildings will be level one and you can upgrade them with money as you progress and succeed in missions.

Buildings such as Mission Control will become important, in which you will be able to accept employment contracts ranging from the simple launch of the first rocket to the more advanced ones for exploration or landing on the planets, from the rescue of a kerbonaut in space to the space tourist transport for which you will have to build a special spaceship that also has room for a passenger, who will appear very scared during launch and delighted once in orbit. The success of these contracts will bring you money, some science points and reputation points. Another important building will be the Administration Building in which you can recruit one of the four Kerbal available and experts, respectively, of finance, public relations, science and repairs: by choosing one, you will get a modifier bonus to increase money, reputation or science depending on the specialty of the recruited Kerbal. We can hire new pilots, engineers or scientists even if we will initially have four available. Pilots can move the rocket, engineers will be able to repair parts that break during the journey, and scientists will increase the science points earned by experimenting. Increasing the level of the various buildings involves the possibility of doing more things: for example if we do not bring the launch pad to level two we will not be able to exceed the weight of 18 tons overall for the rocket or if we do not increase the astronaut center these will not learn to do the EVAs in space and so on. The feeling of progression is maximum but if you play it perfectly, without using any quick save to retry a maneuver or a landing, the Career mode will be very difficult.

For those who already own this title which, we remember, has been in development and can be purchased for four years, the release version, released a few days ago, will not be difficult to understand. However, it introduces some very interesting innovations: first of all, the atmospheric reentry and all that derives from it, as we will have to equip the spaceship with the new heat shields available and maneuver the capsule so that it does not try to re-enter on the parachute side, to unless you fancy roasted Kerbal! The aerodynamics have been slightly changed and you will need to make a more precise and realistic curve towards the horizon to get into orbit decently. Graphic effects have also been added at launch and when crossing certain parts of the atmosphere where the air produces greater friction. There are new types of missions, new parts to build the rocket, a new 'Engineering Report' panel that will point out the obvious mistakes in building the rocket.

The tutorial has been enriched to teach the basics even more precisely and, finally, the Kerbal women have been introduced. This is a great update that makes the product even brighter. The graphics sector is quite simple and minimalist and, at first glance, it seems quite sparse. However, being in orbit around a planet and seeing the light effect of the rising sun as the rocket goes from dark to light gives a very realistic feeling. and really remembers all the various videos and photos that our Samantha Cristoforetti from the ISS sends us. It is not yet free from small graphic bugs when, for example, we try to make transfer maneuvers by simulating the orbits but it is very little and everything is really very pleasant, without needing a particularly performing PC to run properly. The music is really spot on, ranging from jazz / fusion motifs during the construction of the rocket to the ambient genre that suggests the various situations of flight in space. Kerbal Space Program is undoubtedly a difficult game and, perhaps, it is not suitable for those who do not have at least a minimum of patience: the difficulty in the success of a certain objective has nothing to do with the game itself but with physics with the which you will find yourself dealing with, which is why it closely reminds us of what the human being did in the late 50s, when he put a man in a capsule on top of several tons of fuel by shooting him off the planet. However, this difficulty can be reduced by using the mods that run on the network and that the game supports since birth with a special item on the main menu. The most famous of these additions, Mechjeb, you can for example have an autopilot that performs the maneuvers for you: perhaps it facilitates things a little too much but gives you an idea of the maximum result you can achieve with the spaceship and, in fact , the maneuvers will be performed with maximum fuel savings. Ready to launch into space?

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Kerbal Space Program will give you satisfactions that you will rarely have experienced in a video game. We found ourselves jumping for joy the first time we landed on Mun without crashing the ship and this was simply because we had figured out, after numerous failures, how to use rockets to brake properly. It certainly requires patience from the beginning and sometimes it will seem very difficult to understand how to go forward and reach very distant destinations. However, the huge community offers all kinds of help, from video tutorials to the Wiki portal. Remember: in Kerbal Space Program every failure is a source of new discoveries! The multiplayer mode is missing (if not through mods) and it is only in English, but these are minor shortcomings compared to the quality of the offer.