I’ve been waiting a long, long time for a game like Everspace 2. Ever since the first time I plugged in a flight stick to play X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, I’ve dreamt of a game that gave me the freedom to explore space and dogfight across the cosmos. I’ve tried countless space sims over the years, from Elite Dangerous to Rebel Galaxy to Eve Online, but they tend to be overly involved, intimidating, and strangely preoccupied with intergalactic commodity trading. What I want is the expanse of space and the freedom to explore it, but without losing the approachable, action focused gameplay that makes games like Star Wars: Squadrons so exciting. Everspace 2 tries to strike a balance between space sim and arcade shooter, and though its systems might be considered shallow by fans of the genre, it's exactly the game I've been waiting for.
If you wanted to take an open world RPG like The Witcher or Dragon Age and turn it into a space shooter, you'd end up with something close to Everspace 2. The explorable galaxy is filled with side missions, puzzles, races, combat challenges, and countless secrets to discover, and for the most part, you're free to go wherever you want and experience it at your own pace. While not technically open-world, it does a great job of creating the illusion that it is one.
There's seven separate overworlds, each representing a different star system, from which you can travel between individual maps that range in size from quick shootouts around an asteroid to massive industrial complexes and outer space cities. You can leave any map instantly and return to the current overworld by initiating your hyperdrive, and because the celestial bodies in each system maintain their position in scale, it creates a sense that you're always traveling through a single, continuous space, even when short load screens interrupt the flow. It's a clever way to shortcut a true open world map, and it helped me to be able to break down the infinite expanse of outer space into more digestible sections.
Some of the maps you can explore are so densely packed with objectives, it can take an entire play session to complete them. A single location might have multiple side quests, resources and crafting materials to collect, multiple puzzles to solve, and a variety of optional challenges to take on. Everspace 2 has phenomenal environmental puzzles, and completing them accounted for a majority of my play time. They require you to examine the environment and look for clues that lead to non-obvious solutions. It's incredible how many different ways it uses some variation of 'find a ball here and put it over there' or 'shoot these lights in a certain order', but after 40 hours the puzzles still impress me.
A lot of the inventiveness of puzzle solving comes down to the precision of the flight controls. Your ship has a full range of movement, including the ability to strafe and change elevation, which allows you to move effortlessly through tight spaces like the mining tunnels inside an asteroid or the inner workings of a space station. It's not a great flight stick game for that reason, but it creates a lot of opportunity for variety in environments and gameplay. Quests aren't just combat encounters in different locations. There's stealth missions where you need to carefully fly through security gates or follow someone without being noticed. There's timed missions that require precise flying through dangerous terrain. Some missions are purely puzzle focused. There's more gameplay experiences here than I thought were possible in a space shooter.
Having the full range of motion does make combat a little less spectacular than other arcade shooters like Squadrons. Most fights can be won by simply getting into range of the enemies and bursting them down as quickly as possible. Sometimes tough enemies will force you to use your ships special abilities - like EMP blasts or short-range teleports - and I burned through healing and defensive consumables like candy, but your effectiveness in combat has a lot more to do with your gear and your level than your flying prowess.
The need to constantly improve your gear and level eventually becomes a hindrance. If you try to mainline the story and only stop for side quests when they’re convenient, you’ll eventually fall behind the level of enemy ships so much you won’t be able to continue. Around halfway through, the story missions start jumping up two full levels between each one, meaning you’ll need to spend a significant amount of time off the critical path farming XP in order to continue. Frontier Developments predicts 30 hours to complete the campaign, but with the amount of XP farming you have to do just to keep up, it could be twice that. This is a massive game and a major time investment, but if you take it in chunks and work your way through each system one at a time, it can be a relaxing and satisfying experience.
In between missions, there are tons of RPG systems to play with. Completing a single side quest will fill your inventory with weapons and ship parts and varying rarity you can equip, sell, or break down into crafting materials that can then be used to make new weapons and ship parts. There are many different classes of ships you can buy, each with their own stat weights and special abilities. My favorite is heavy carrier class with big shields that makes your secondary weapons use energy instead of ammo, which has saved me a lot of money on refuel and repair costs.
There’s also a group of companion characters that offer passive bonuses if you give them specific resources, and during the late game I spent a lot of time traveling the galaxy looking for metal and parts that would unlock new bonuses, like the ability to construct gates and fast travel between systems. All of these systems are fairly shallow, and once they’re introduced they don’t evolve at all throughout the game. But compared to other games in the genre, I found these simple RPG systems to be a breath of fresh air. You don’t need a degree in economics to understand how to play the market here, and I’m grateful for that.
Like Diablo or Borderlands, the pursuit of shiny new loot was the main motivation that pushed me to keep playing and exploring. Unfortunately, the narrative and the characters quickly became background noise, good for little more than an occasional chuckle. The premise is strong: you are one of the last living clone of a high ranking officer in the Colonial Fleet, but the cloning program has been made illegal, and now you’re on the run from both the Colonial Fleet and its enemies.
There are a number of competing factions that weave through the story and you attempt to acquire the resources you need to make your escape to a remote, far off system where no one will find you. As the story progresses you find you have a bigger role to play in the ongoing space conflicts. There’s a big cast of characters and secrets of an ancient alien race to uncover. It’s clearly pulling a lot from Mass Effect and Star Wars, but the story takes far too long to get going, and the characters are all flat and forgettable. If you’re looking for the next sci-fi epic from Everspace 2, you’ll be disappointed.
Everspace 2 doesn’t have a great story and its systems aren’t particularly deep, but the things it does well more than make up for its shortcomings. Once you get into the rhythm of traveling from map to map and clearing all of the objectives, it’s alarmingly easy to lose track of time. Rockfish has stuffed so many stunning locations into this game. Whether you’re skimming the surface of a desert planet, circling a half-destroyed moon with its core exposed, or navigating through tight corridors to deliver ramen in a floating metropolis, there’s always something new to see. I’m so glad there’s finally an approachable space sim out there, and I can’t wait to dive into the Ancient Rift endgame loot farm. This is a game I’m going to be playing for a long time.
Everspace 2
Everspace 2 allows you to play out grand space battles across a variety of cosmic locations. It takes elements from hit open-world RPGs and mixes them with mining, crafting, and deep space exploration.
