Kerbal Space Program: I'll Think of a Title Right After This Intercept Manuever

I've been on the fence about reviewing this game as it's still in development.  But there was recently a "Career" mode added in and I feel like it's far enough along to actually have an idea of what the final game will be like, and it's going to be like crack.  Frustrating, insanely complex, analytical crack.

Do you remember the last game that blew you away with depth?  I don't mean what passes for depth now.  RPG elements in shooters does not count as "depth".  I'm talking Morrowind, Alpha Centauri and anything Paradox has put our pretty much ever.  Where right when you feel you have a handle on the game you realize you haven't even scratched the surface?  Well that's the spirit that Kerbal Space Program captures.  In the beginning, you basically just try to make rockets that don't instantly explode and see how high you can get them to go.  Which is insanely fun in it's own right.  The first time you actually leave the atmosphere carries a huge sense of accomplishment.

IT LANDED!

And it has this wonderfully cartoonish sense of humor.  You control these little green goblin men called "Kerbals" and basically act as NASA with the theme of "We want a space program, but we don't want to spend a lot of money..."  Eventually you'll get bored of just building crazy rockets and look up some tutorials or do some of the ones in game and things start to get weird.  Now getting out of the atmosphere is a given, but whether or not you calculated fuel consumption and exit vectoring to land yourself in stable orbit becomes your goal.  And then that becomes the norm and you start planning gravitic slingshots to catch and intercept to the moon just so you can get an orbit around that.  You'll start to understand the meaning and purpose of a pro-grade burn at your orbital perapsis and elipsotic vectoring.  Then you'll make it, you'll land something on Mun, and god damn is it going to feel good.  It took everything you had to make it to the Mun.  Several hundred rocket designs, precise planning from the second you lift off, complex maneuvering, retro-grade landing burns, escape velocities, but then you scroll out on the celestial map and you are humbled.

There's 9 more planets.  And to scroll out far enough to see them, you find that the Mun you just landed on isn't even far enough away to warrant it's own dot.  But the best part is it's all possible, all of it.  Deep space probes, space stations, satellites with massive solar arrays and you haven't even started, but you will because it's so damn compelling.  I've had this game for a while but it's still causing me late nights and making me neglect essentially all the games I just bought because I don';t want to play anything else.  I'll load something else up, but 20 minutes later, KSP is back up because I just though of a new rocket design.  Now if you'll excuse me, I'm due to start my ion burn on my deep space probe.

Yeah, figure out how that happened.