Introduction
Everspace is an interesting space game series developed and published by German Developers – Rockfish Games. The first entry in this series had rougelike mechanics, this one is an RPGlite in space. Roguelike and rogue lite is not my thing that keep me away from first Everspace. If it is your thing then you can pick it from GOG, it is on sale for $0.99 (in India) very often.
I discovered Everspace 2 – two years ago through this Nyxson Everspace 2 review video. Back then I had an itch to play it but I wasn’t able to play due to lack of compatible system. This game is demanding, hence beautiful looking. 2 years later I decided to give it a shot.
In this review, I am highlighting everything I observed in my first hour of gameplay. I also like to disclose that I spend more than 6 hours in it on the Hard difficulty. Although, I documented my experience just after playing it for an hour and (give or take) fifteen minutes.
Gameplay
Everspace 2, despite being a space-fantasy game, feels more like an FPS game. Let me explain why. The very first thing game threw to me with an attached gamepad was to decide the preferred layout. Out of the two layouts, the first one was FPS-like, and the second was racing game-like. I am paraphrasing the titles since I forgot to capture screenshot, but they did mentioned FPS and Racing in it.
I picked the FPS one. The control scheme works exactly like how you would control a spaceship in an FPS game:
- The Left Trigger makes your ship descend, and the Left Bumper makes it ascends.
- The Right Trigger controls your ship’s guns, and the Right Bumper launches missiles.
- The Left stick handles your typical WASD movement, and Right stick will maneuver your ship in an open space or control your camera to be specific.
I wonder, had I preferred the racing-game layout, would I be playing a racing game instead of an FPS🤔?
Prologue
Prologue mission started with Adam and his buddy Ben wing-manning a G&B mining fleet towards a mine. Adam encountered his first outlaw after spending 5 minutes clearing the path. The Outlaw misidentified him as his backup but started attacking him when he revealed his identity. Then, he encountered more Outlaws where game threw him in his first combat.
As the story progressed, Ben’s ship got heavily damaged and he decided to deescalate however Adam and Ben captured by dominating Outlaws.
Adam met a man named Dax in the holding. A hooded man, who was not part of the outlaw, appeared as a hologram and threw a bombshell on me revealing that Adam is a clone. At some point in the story, Dax told Adam people around here dislikes clones. Dax saw Adam as a ticket to leave DMZ. They both escaped the facility when outlaws was attacked.
After escaping, Dax take Adam’s to his homestead that is located in Rhodia-II, Ceto System. Dax gave him a mission to set up 3 non-functioning Signal Jammers called bean bags. Clearing that mission marked my hour for my Everspace 2 review.
Controls
Since I have already mentioned how the control feels like. I would like to explain a bit better in this section. The first thing that irked me was rotating my ship. Pushing Right stick down and moving Right stick in any direction rotate your ship accordingly. It seems simple at first, but very rough in execution. I would rather have a button combo to recenter my ship according to its position in space instead of doing all of that. Cockpit view makes it harder to aim toward the enemy. Maneuvering feels stiff in cockpit view, especially compared to enemy ships, which move much faster than yours.
Cinematics
There is a popular interactive game published by Xbox Game Studio called As Dusk Falls. It is a wonderful story driven cinematic game that progress the story with your decisions. The motion-comic cinematics style in both games are strikingly similar. However, Everspace 2 did it better. Cinematics in As Dusk Fall was bit unbearable to me and it started messing up with my mind during longer sessions. It is unfair to compare, since Everspace 2 has limited cutscenes. But, I still prefer Everspace 2 cinematics over that game due to their smoothness.
Moreover, you can pause and skip the cinematics, as well as play watch it whenever you want.
Select Screen Options
You never leaves the spaceship, hence you got no hub 😭. However, you can dock your ship to any docking station that comes in the shape of homestead hangar and shops. They work like your Select screen along with their own distinctions. Shop allows you to trade items, where as, homestead allows you to store and fetch items.
Select Screen in itself handle all of your in-game options. It allows you to:
- Customize the looks of your ship.
- Upgrade your abilities.
- Craft items on the fly.
- Check your inventory. Equip or un-equip any ship component.
- Display Map.
- Check, track, and untrack missions.
There is another fantastic tab called – Data. It displays your playtime, your challenges, codex, and it allows you to watch cinematics from previous missions.
Other Quality of Life Additions
Saving – You can save your game anytime as long as you are not engaged in a combat. Similar to AC Odyssey, you can disengage with enemies and make a save, and then re-enter in a combat. You can make quick-save by pressing X from the Start menu. The default manual saving option allows you to rename your save and show additional information (as in screenshot below).
Photo Mode… exists; it let you change the focus, FOV, and brightness. But I said it just exist because:
- You have to enable it through the Start Menu.
- It disabled during cutscenes or when jumping between the systems.
- It doesn’t actually capture screenshots, it only hides the HUD. You have to capture screenshots manually.
Repairs are adjustable, you can select how much repair you need to save money in the early game. Your ship is going to damage a lot in the Hard setting. You can check this funny reddit comment summarizing its hard difficulty.
Presentation? Look, this is an RPG-like game, RPGs are notorious to dump information on you at the very start, take any of them.
However, I never felt overwhelmed by its information dumping. In fact, information is displayed in digestible chunks through popups. Besides, the details of any equipment is also handled well, brief and to the point.
Conclusion
Everspace 2 is a unique game in every aspect. Its very hard to compare with other space games because either they are limited to online MMORPG genre or they are isometric, or pixelated games where you commander your own built spaceships. Everspace 2 let you do shooting in an open space, keep in mind that map is divided into zones, and every zone has its set boundary. In conclusion, I am favorable towards it, and I am looking forward to whatever I’ve left to unpack in this 30 hour long space-fantasy looter-shooter game.
