Everspace 2 Early Access Review

The Roguelikes may be enjoying their moment in the sun in recent years (just ask Hades, our Game of the Year for 2020), but Everspace 2 shows that procedural generation isn’t the only way to go. The original Everspace is a cool space hunter roguelike, but the sequel has changed course to a more traditional action-RPG style, and its series of missions through an open region of space feels a lot more in the vein of Freelancer or Rebel Galaxy Outlaw as a result. But he retains his system of free movement, which makes his combat stand out in style from other space shooters. There’s already a fair amount of it to explore when it launches in Early Access, and that keeps things interesting by mixing up puzzle solutions to break up flashy fights.

The story here is a pretty strong start: it picks up our clone pilot from the first game, except with the interesting twist that this time around we’re on his last life: if he dies now, he’s dead for good. So far, there isn’t much to be done about the galaxy hating clones now and most who learn its true identity will shy away from it, but it looks like a setup that could add something to his quest to make him a mercenary and escape the lawless region. space in which it finds itself blocked. Admittedly, the main character is a bit bland, as you would expect from a throwaway clone – he only really shows passion when he goes wild on ramen. However, his companion characters – including the returning AI companion – have a bit more personality. Even unique characters who give you side missions in Spaceports have above average flavor and voice acting. There’s no way to guide the story through dialogue, but at least it seems like it’s happening in somewhat intriguing places.

Everspace 2 Early Access Screenshots

Primarily, Everspace 2 is all about combat. Having more recently played more traditional space fighter games like Star Wars: Squadrons and Rebel Galaxy Outlaw, it was a minor struggle for me to get back into that particular flight groove: instead of opening a throttle to move forward. at a constant speed like an airplane, here your ship moves much more like a character in a typical shooter. If you don’t press a button, you’ll stop (unless you turn off your inertial dampers, in which case you’ll keep moving but have to push to change direction). This Descent style dogfight is great fun once you get the hang of it and allows you to do a lot of strafing maneuvers that you don’t see elsewhere. A little unusual, Everspace 2 certainly seems much better suited to mouse and keyboard controls than gamepads due to the number of inputs needed to put it to good use, but gamepad controls are certainly doable.

Each weapon has both energy and kinetic damage rating, so fights mostly consist of switching between them as needed to take down enemy shields or armor, occasionally spitting out a homing missile, stupid fire rocket, or mine as and when. You also need to manage your cooldowns efficiently so that you can activate your ship’s special abilities at the right time to detonate or cripple the strongest enemies, or just make a quick jaunt. There’s a good variety here in that you can swap and customize your abilities – one of the starting powers is an EMP blast that deactivates all enemy ships around you for 10 seconds, letting you pick the most for free. dangerous of them, and I increased it with a power-up that reduced its cooldown by two seconds for each enemy I killed during its effect. The other starter is a jail break card that keeps your ship out of danger at high speed, allowing you to leave when the going gets tough; I squeezed this one to go 80% faster, but only half the time. You unlock more of these abilities as you go, and I quickly learned that using them well is what allows you to survive fights against groups of high-level enemies.

Your ultimate ability, however, is tied to your choice of ship, and at the moment there is a handful available for purchase after racking up credits while piloting your starting fighter. Your starting ship fires an electric beam that chains to other targets and can wipe out a group of fighters and their drone escorts with one shot, while the towering battleship I upgraded to activate a turret that automatically shoots everything around you for 20 seconds. you keep exploding. I was a little disappointed that the battleship didn’t behave very differently, but it gave me much more robust armor stats and allows you to carry more primary weapons, at the cost of consumable item slots that can be equipped (although this doesn’t make sense as you can pause and swap them anytime in the middle of combat).

The variety of enemies isn’t huge, but it’s enough to keep things from getting too repetitive: I knew I had to approach combat differently when I spotted a heavily armored enemy with what amounts to a rifle of space hunting, or when I had to take out certain types of drones before they could trap me or self-destruct at close range. Large capital ships are rare in early story missions, but it’s fun to remove their turrets when they present themselves.

Then, naturally, you collect the sweet and sweet loot from the aftermath of the satisfying explosion effects. There is a pretty good variety of pew-pew-pew lasers available, from fast-firing chain guns that take a moment to spin to sniper and shotgun style blasts, constant beams, and more. They are all and rare, rare, and superior gear come with some very useful bonus effects. Some of my strengths included a shield generator that projects a smaller wave of EMP each time the shield collapses, deactivating everything around me just long enough to lose a pursuer; and a higher Gatling cannon did more damage when my ship was in the sun and even more damage when fighting higher level enemies than me. I also like the leveling system which allows you to increase the level or rarity of a piece of equipment that you want to keep by dismantling other pieces of the same rarity, although at this early stage , the levels come and go quickly enough to restrict the equipment to just one upgrade making its usefulness limited. Maybe in the later levels it will be more important to upgrade gradually, but there isn’t enough content in Everspace 2 yet to take us that far.

Beyond combat, the level of movement control allows Everspace 2 to do a lot more with puzzles than what you see in most space shooters. Much of his loot rewards are hidden behind obstacle courses and tucked away in turns that an X-wing couldn’t easily reach. You will be dispatched to do things like pick up key items and put them in position to unlock containers and passageways where you have to navigate your ship through tight spaces, roll to get through closing doors, all of this. on a running clock. Some of these puzzle activities resulted in more downtime than I would have liked, as your sensors aren’t particularly long range at first, so you have to navigate aimlessly for objects to interact with. , and sometimes the areas are excessively dark and I had to use my guns as sonar to see where the walls were. But it’s great to have something to do in a game like this besides shooting everything I see.Everything looks and sounds great, including the all new planetary environments. The visual variety and eye-catching terrain details they add are striking; when you’ve been staring into the void of space for a while, flying low through a canyon in bright sunlight is a very different aspect. That’s not to say that spatial areas are visually monotonous – far from it. Everspace 2 does a great job of being pretty to look at, with colorful backgrounds and atmospheric effects highlighting large asteroids and platforms in the distance to entice you to explore them, and you are regularly sent to caves. and massive wrecks.

What is shocking is the transition between the zones. Jumping in and out of a faster-than-light journey causes a brief loading screen – the sort of thing most games these days hide with a flashy animation effect. It’s not a big deal, but I’ve noticed it every time; since No Man’s Sky managed to make the smooth transition between atmosphere and space and back without them five years ago, these seams have become more difficult to ignore.

In total, it took me about 13 hours to go through the entire early access story of Everspace 2, and that takes into account the frequent stops to rack up XP and loot at unexplored locations that were spawning on my. map as I warped between missions. It also comes to an abrupt end during what feels like the start of a new mission rather than a logical breaking point. The other obvious sign that this is a work in progress – aside from the very occasional bugs and the watermark in the corner of the screen saying so – is that a few of its storyboard-style cutscenes are placeholders that simply give you the gist of things. to have the dubbers play by the actors. And while the end screen prompts me to explore the remaining side missions and activities, I definitely lost the motivation to grind for better loot after the plot ended and only managed a few extra hours.

This is also when it becomes clear that Everspace 2 doesn’t have much of a commodity market. Yes, you can buy and sell small amounts of things like alcohol and ramen at different prices in different ports, but there is no system to track all of this, so setting up a route trading doesn’t seem like a practical way to make money. now. Plus, you’re never attacked while in transit between ports, so even if you could, it would be an extremely boring way to make a living.