If ever there was a poster game for how “Edutainment” should be done, it’s this. Since installing the Xbox One version last week and letting my ten-year-old son play, I’ve been treated to a number of ideas from him on how he can improve his rockets, get stable orbits, and maybe get a Kerbal to the Mun. That last point really gets to the best thing about the console versions of KSP: it’s more accessible now. Save, at least, for the fact that you’re likely playing on a bigger screen from a comfy chair, rather than at your desk. Played that way, the experience would be practically indistinguishable from playing on a PC. On the Xbox One then, KSP is a perfect candidate for Microsoft’s announced keyboard and mouse support.
#Kerbal space program xbox one part mirroring tv
Aligning rocket parts together is a bit more touchy with a thumbstick than with a mouse, and a lot of the UI needs scaling adjustments (which are an available in-game option) from the default to be seen properly on a TV screen. Vehicle controls feel more intuitive on the gamepad, with pitch and roll mapping defaulting to the left stick, and yaw mapped to the analog triggers. It’s not the cleanest system, but it works.
In the menus and building screens, your Left Stick drives a cursor, with controller buttons standing in for the Left and Right mouse buttons. Ah, Ground Control, we may have a slight problem.Ĭoming into the console version, my biggest question was what had changed? How would they adapt the mouse-centric rocket building system to work with controllers? Simply put, they didn’t.