Space, the shiny, debris-strewn frontier. These are the voyages of a clone pilot, boldly going where no clone pilot has gone before: to freedom!
Welcome back to Everspace 2, Rockfish’s corner of a galaxy full of adventure and shiny explosions. And boy, are there plenty of explosions. Space is full of them, wonderful pyroclastic clouds billowing out in waves of superheated destruction. It’s also full of loot.
This time around, Everspace 2 ditches the rogue-like design of the original in which you played a clone pilot resurrected infinitely after each defeat to continue fighting. Now you’re returning as that same clone pilot with one caveat: This is your last life. There are no more 1ups for you. Looking to make enough cash to escape the DMZ, your cover is blown by some pirates, putting you back on the radar and throwing you deeper into the mercenary lifestyle as you look for a way to save your injured friend. Doing this and getting your neck off the chopping block requires that one, last score.
With the rogue-lite aspects of the first Everspace jettisoned into deep, cold space, Everspace 2 now plays like a light arcade looter-shooter RPG, complete with all the trimmings of the genre and some new gameplay additions to break up the pace. Cue plenty of dogfights across hand-crafted environments, exploration across vast frontiers, some light environmental puzzle-solving and all-new planetary missions.
Everspace 2 manages to find a nice balance between exploration and dogfighting. You’re never all that far away from a fight, and many times you can avoid them if you want to, as you explore the large locations the game takes you to. Asteroid-filled spaces, derelict ships and dark mining caverns are only some of the places you will go. And most of them will have enemies patrolling the area for you to deal with.
You don’t want to avoid combat because you need to level up. XP is gained from completing missions and killing enemies and Everspace is a challenging enough game that you want to keep on levelling and changing up your equipment. Enemies also randomly drop loot and resources when they blow up, ranging from ore to weapons and parts. And not dying an early death requires you to buy or find new weapons and parts or upgrade existing ones.
Upgrades, if you have the requisite resources, can improve your existing equipment or, if you have the blueprints and resources, you can craft new ones ranging from common to rare. Keeping your ship in tip-top shape means equipping new scanners, energy sources, plating and weapons, which range from flimsy blasters to flak cannons to a variety of missiles. There’s a great variety of weapons on offer here, each with its own stats to take into account, along with their effects that determine your play style.
You’ll have to pay attention to different damage types, such as kinetic or energy damage so it pays to have a varied loadout that you can switch between on the fly. You’ll also get access to special abilities, such as an EMP pulse, whose cooldowns you’ll have to manage. I found these were best used to get out of tough situations, of which there are quite a few here. There are also perks and perk upgrades, such as using resources to reduce how long it takes to jump to warp speed, basically.
Thankfully combat is a lot of fun. The Descent-style full 360-degree combat can take a while to get used to, especially in hectic fights or enclosed spaces, but the ship’s arcade handling always felt up to the task. I never felt like I had to spend too long chasing down an enemy ship, or struggled to get one off my tail as I’ve found in a lot of other dogfighting games. The ship’s manoeuvrability and thruster-based dodges and rolls are really effective at keeping you on the ball at all times.
Winning a fight isn’t just about having the most powerful zappers though, it’s also about using your environment to your advantage and Everspace 2 is full of debris for you to zip around and use for cover. Most often I found trying to take down a squadron in open space to be among the worst of ideas.
The game also throws a lot to do at you in the course of its 35-plus hours, longer if you choose to see all there is to see. There are side missions to take on, jobs to do for cash and plenty of locations to explore, some of which will pop up while travelling through warp space. And you do want to grab as much cash as possible. Whether that’s to buy resources for upgrades, new equipment or just new ships, things in the DMZ can get pretty pricey.
That said I never felt like I really needed to hang onto items simply because they went for more in one system versus another. Repairing and restocking my ship wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, especially if you invest in the perk that reduces repair costs.
The game inventory and status screens can be a bit confusing at first as well. There’s a lot going on here between inventory management, upgrades, crafting, ship customisation and, well, a whole lot more.
Visually Everspace 2 is gorgeous to look at. Whether you’re flying through derelict space stations, close to planetary rings or through gas clouds, avoiding laser fire, missiles or billowing explosions, Everspace 2’s rendition of space is gorgeous to fly through. Ships leave multi-coloured trails behind them as they avoid your laser fire or warp into and out of systems. The sound design is also stunning to match with weaponry sounding positively delicious and powerful.
Everspace 2 does take a bit of time to get started though. Its opening hours are a bit of a slow drip feed as the game gets you up to speed on its systems and keeps you in the role of a glorified delivery man as you scavenge for resources and fetch and deliver items. But once you’re past those first couple of hours, the game and story expands, pulling you to diverse and interesting locations, with tons of more challenging and thought-provoking combat.
Featuring a great flight and combat system, fantastic visuals and performance, Everspace 2 is the exact sort of arcade space shooter I was looking for.
Everspace 2 Console Launch Trailer
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