Kerbal Space Program

Kerbal Space Program is a game about cute little rectangular headed green aliens that are smart enough (just barely though) to go into space, and you are the planner, builder, rocket scientist and pilot of the rockets you build. What’s that you say? “It can’t be that hard, it’s a game? Well, that’s where you are wrong, the game uses realistic physics, yep, the stuff that is maths with a side of science and a glass full of hours of boring lectures and tests you have no idea how to do, because you slept through the lecturers all year juice.

Yeah, now you’re wishing you hadn’t slept through those classes so you could understand what Gravity is, and what that has to do with the rocket that you spent half and hour… no, it was three hours… building, and still it can’t lift it off the ground. Before you go mental, and use that new steam refund system, there is help for making your orbits and docking, and, for building and lifting off your rockets, there are two tutorials. Then, that’s you in the big world and all you remember is the funny voice that the Kerbal instructor had, and also your two best friends: Google and You Tube.

There are a big handful of parts to use in your rocket and loads and loads and loads of mods to make your life easier. There are also planets and moons you can land on or, if you’ve failed so many times trying, you can get really angry at the Kerbals if think you’re a hard man by propelling cute, innocent and defenceless little green aliens into the sun, (it is fun though).

I remember the first time I sent something into orbit and I admired my accomplishment then it suddenly started crashing head first into Kerbins, (KSP’s version of Earth), atmosphere because I forgot to turn off the engines! Now I have a massive space station orbiting every planet, and science and mining bases on every planet and moon, small little space probes all over the place (and about fifty trillion tones of debris and uncountable amounts of dead or lost Kerbins floating about in the deep dark abyss called space). It will rob you of month’s worth of hours and your social life, and your work life, or just your life in general, but it’s all for a good cause as it’s educational. Who wouldn’t want to know how fast you could get your rocket to go before the laws of physics makes you a distant memory or your run out of fuel?

If you are a fan of core shaking audio, you’ll love the sound of the rockets kicking in, it’s a mix between a hungry Giant’s belly rumbling and an explosion going off in a cave. Also, the explosive sound of your rocket hitting the ground at terminal velocity will give you a fright no matter how ready you are or how many times you crash. BANG!!! Did I get you? No? Well then, I just feel silly.

The game can run on any computer with at least 4 GB of RAM and a CPU made past the release of windows 7, same with the GPU with minimal lag. My computer is brand new and has a top of the range processor and graphics card with 8 GB RAM and I ca still make it want to commit suicide by lag. ( I wanted to see if I could send 50 of the biggest fuel tanks in the base game and a lot, and I mean a lot, of engines and Kerbals to the sun. I got to the launch pad and instead of crashing and making my computer spontaneously combust, as would have happened on my old laptop, it tried to beast through and let’s just say I’m happy I backed up my game three times before attempting this as it just didn’t open back up again after I crashed. When I tried to launch it just noped the biggest amount of nope in the history of nope-kind and just restarted my computer. So, even if you have a super-computer with one billion Petabytes of RAM don’t do what I did, I feared for my computer’s life.

This game is a MUST buy and throw your cash and life at it as it’s sooooooooooo (three pages later.) oooo *ultimate Kirby-like inhale* AWESOME. Like, come on, what isn’t good about building your own rockets and crashing them into planets or landing on the moon and planting a flag saying deez nuts?

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Article by Lewis Anderson.