Kerbal Space Program
Kerbal Space Program or KSP as it is known is a 3D space themed sandbox game. In KSP you manage your own space agency on a fictional earth like planet called Kerbin. The game comes complete with a “kerbalized” version of our solar system. It includes planets such Moho (Mercury), Eve (Venus), Kerbin (Earth), Duna (Mars) and Jool (Jupiter). You can spend countless hours building, flying and crashing your way through the solar system.
Kerbin is inhabited by little green aliens known as Kerbals. Players can create rockets, aircraft, space planes and rovers with the provided sets of components. The components are grouped by their functionality such as command pods, fuel tanks, engines, wings, landing gear and so on. Vehicles are constructed by dragging, dropping and snapping together various components in the Kerbal version of NASA’s giant vehicle assembly building.
A few clicks of the mouse will place your newly built spacecraft on the launch pad where you can load them up with your bravest Kerbals for their first test flight. If all goes well, which it wont, your kerbals may soon find themselves in orbit. With a little practice, and a lot of rocket science, you’ll be sending kerbals to the moon and beyond in no time.
Kerbal Space Program was released in 2015 by the indie game studio Squad out of Mexico City, Mexico. The game is available on Mac, Windows, PS4 and Xbox One platforms. It was designed and developed using the Unity3d game engine. The game has minimal graphics requirements only needing a graphics processing unit (GPU) capable of running the shader model 3 architecture with 512mb of VRAM. The game includes a custom physics engine for space flight and uses NVIDIA’s PhysX for on planet physics.
Overall I find KSP to be an engaging game for thinkers. If your into space, engineering or exploring I recommend this game. However, if your looking for non stop action, this is probably not the right game for you.