This review is more of a rant of my most recent experience.

I know the game is in alpha but playing the survival mode is incredibly frustrating. im having issues where i cant build on platforms or i cant interact with specific specific blocks to build them. which is annoying but managable, what isnt managable is that at some point my thrusters completely stopped working, both atmosphere and hydrogen. no idea why, everything was connected, my tanks were full and i had ice to fuel it. but they just stopped working. last i recall i was messing with the batteries to get them to charge, because solar doesnt work go figure. i deleted a ore detector and moved it on my ship then put back a hydrogen thruster i was missing (i had replaced it with the ore detector, long story). and it just stopped working. for some reason i could still barely move but it felt like the same speed the engineer had, so i was able to get up to speed but my thrusters were not working. pressing z wouldn't slow the ship down at all and it just kept flying, eventually i got caught by gravity on the starting planet and started to fall, i turned my atmosphere thrusters on and nothing happened, my battery was at 26% but same as the hydrogen nothing happened and i eventually left the game before i hit the ground, my last save was 2 hours ago and thats an annoying amount of progress to lose.

TLDR, survival isnt playable. too many bugs. if you want the game just wait till its in beta or fully released.

I'll change my review when these issues are fixed

I thought the basics would have been sorted by now but falling through the earth mining ice and less realistic/enjoyable mining than original. Long way to go

Unplayable due to nonstop and consistent driver timeouts. Nonexistent troubleshooting support.

This is partly a mini review, and partly a rant about Keen's overwhelmingly bad customer support — or complete lack thereof.

For the very few short minutes I can actually play the game before it crashes, I can spot a few good things compared to the prequel SE1. The new 25cm unified grid system is obviously the best selling point, followed by smaller details like the better-looking destruction effects, but I found very little else worth highlighting.

The new UI looks cold and rough compared to SE1, the menu sound effects feel like a downgrade (I much prefer SE1 ones, may be subjective), and the mouse smoothing makes looking around feel weird in ships (Which I believe after checking settings that it can't be turned off, could be wrong here.). The graphical improvements don't seem worth it given the worse performance and arguably less appealing art style. The new engine also makes distant terrain look all jumbled together. Once again, could be nostalgia for SE1 speaking, could be a real critique.

However;
These things can be ironed out since the game is still in early access, and are practically non-issues.
The real reason for the negative review is the godawful stability issues.

The support from Keen Software House regarding troubleshooting has been one of the worst I have ever seen from a dev team. In fact, it's hard to even call it support when there's been practically nothing to show for it. This is especially disappointing because I loved SE1 (1000+ hours) and was super excited for the sequel. I understand that alpha means unfinished features and bugs here and there, but there's a clear difference between "rough" and "completely and 100% unplayable.". Because of this, I cannot recommend SE2 at all in its current state. In my honest opinion, you're better off playing the first game for a very long time.

The game consistently crashes either immediately upon loading into a map, or just minutes later with AMD driver timeouts. I have tried every single fix out there for weeks — to the point where it felt like I was doing QA work for the developers.

The troubleshooting process made it all the more frustrating, and is the reason I spared some time post a review.

I started by asking for help on the Steam forums with no responses from Keen, apart from a community helper telling me to make a support ticket on their workshop website. I then made a support ticket that went unanswered for well over 2 months. After which I've joined the official discord to ask for help, where the same community helper (a moderator there) told me I should make a bug report instead of a support ticket, seeing it had no replies in 2 months. In the new bug report thread, I received only a few basic replies recommending methods I'd already tried ("Is your PC overheating? Is it a laptop or Desktop?") followed by complete radio silence.

If you are having even the slightest technical issue that makes the game unplayable for you, I wish you luck in finding whatever esoteric mystical medium of communication you need to establish to get a simple answer to fix your game.

My total of 2.2 hours played has been nothing but troubleshooting: trying to keep the game running without crashing, testing every menu option, different settings, driver reinstalls, and every other fix I could find. If Keen actually fixes anything, I will update my review accordingly.