Kerbal Space Program, still one of the best games you can play on PC today, has brought out its second-ever expansion, Breaking Ground, which gives you more things to do once you touch down on another planet.
You’ll get booster antennae, solar panels, weather stations, seismometers, ion detectors, a device that analyzes goo and other equipment to deploy after you land. They’ll collect data that you can relay back to Kerbin, learning more about the place you’re visiting. The seismometer particularly takes my fancy: to get a reading, you have to deliberately crash things into the surface. Check out some of the gizmos in action in this trailer from last week.
You’ll also find new surface features, such as meteors, craters, rock outcroppings, and cryovolcanoes. You can pick some of them up—rocks, not volcanoes, presumably—and bring them back home for further testing. Any that you can’t take home will have to be analyzed on-site, either with your Kerbals or with unmanned rovers, which have new robotic arms to scan the area around them.
Lastly, the expansion adds new items to plug into your crafts, such as hinges, pistons and rotors. You’ll get a robotics controller system to make sure they all work together.
It certainly sounds substantial, and the fact it’s only the second expansion since Kerbal Space Program came out in 2015 makes it feel like a big deal. Making History, the first expansion, was very good indeed—check out Ian’s review here.
It’s $15/£13 on Steam.