Everspace 2 review 2023: a stellar space shooter game

Everspace 2 is loud, colorful, and full of explosions. It combines the looter-shooter RPG treadmill with arcade-style space dogfights to make an interesting mix that can be played in a lot of different ways. Even though it looks like a space sim and has some similarities, like fighting pirates, mining asteroids, and building your reputation, Everspace 2 is not a space sim. To its benefit and detriment, this is a pure loot-and-shoot game that cares more about entertaining you with flashy fights and letting you change your fighter in a wild number of ways than simulating or stimulating you with anything else.

Everspace 2: Description

That should tell a lot of you right there if you want to play it or not. The other thing is that technically this is a sequel, but… not really. The first Everspace is a roguelite where every mission is procedurally generated. This one is a more traditional action RPG where you take on a main story quest and side missions, solve open-world puzzles, and blow through randomly generated contracts for about 50 hours to finish the main story. Or 100 hours to play through everything. Then, if you like, you can spend a few dozen more on improving your builds so you can attack the randomly generated endgame parts.

All of this means that Everspace 2 is quite different from the first game, even though the story is the same: You are one of those clone pilots you played as in the first one, but you can’t come back from the dead anymore. You might be happy about that if you liked the story in the first one. If you didn’t play the first one, you might be a little lost at times, but there are a lot of detailed, but mostly forgettable, log entries to catch you up on the story and world you’re thrown into.

Everspace 2: Pros and Cons

System Requirements

Everspace 2: Free Space

There is a lot of stuff in space. If you kill a pirate, open a chest (which are actually cargo containers since we are in space), or find something random floating in the void, like the wreckage of a ship that blew up a long time ago, you’ll get a reward. It could just be scrap metal or trade goods, or it could be a new gun or a missile refill. It could be something really great that you have never seen before. Bases with ship dealers let you buy new ships, but you’ll need a lot of credits. Most ship upgrades include new guns, secondary weapons like homing missiles, and special attacks like a surge of static electricity that can damage or destroy nearby ships. You have to charge these up before you can use them, like a Street Fighter super.

There’s a shield that recharges (some only charge when you boost), armour plating, nanobots that can fix things, devices that limit damage, and modifications for your weapons that make them do more damage, disable shields, or give you more XP for killing someone. It’s a lot to keep track of, and if you’re speeding through missions and switching weapons often, the short time you can’t shoot while a new module is winched in is something to watch out for. These delays don’t change how fast the game goes as much as they make it harder to change weapons on the fly.

Everspace 2: Colony wars

You don’t have to have played Everspace 1 in order to play Everspace 2. As Adam Roslin, a clone pilot with the memories and piloting skills of his DNA donor, who blew up a lot of things in Everspace, you will work for a mining company under a fake name, trying to shoot enough space anemones and defend against enough pirates to earn a ticket out of the DMZ at the edge of human-colonized space. The zone is what’s left of a war against aliens, and it’s full of aliens, many of which are based on aquatic life.

Your ship is a single-seat fighter that can carry some cargo and can change modules and weapons on the fly. You never leave it, except for the cutscenes, which are voiced but hand-drawn and stop-motion. It’s a bold style choice, but it works, making what could have been a bunch of potato-faced Mass Effect types with extra stubble into something artistic and nice to look at. As you progress, supporting characters will join your home base crew. They will bring engineering and medical skills in the form of perks that you can unlock by earning credits and resources, and they will also talk on the radio.

If you’ve ever been a bounty hunter in Elite: Dangerous, you’ll recognize a lot of what’s going on here. There are three ways to move faster than your thrusters can do. One is for traveling within a system, another is for moving over longer distances, and the third is jumpgates, which can take you even farther. When you are going fast and measuring distances in light-seconds, strange signals catch your eye and pull you off course into a rescue mission with pirates or a big ship stuck in a minefield. At least there’s an autopilot, so you don’t have to perfectly time your landing from FTL travel to make sure you don’t go too far past your destination.

Final Words

Critics liked the game’s beautiful graphics, fun gameplay, and interesting world. People liked that the game’s story was better than its predecessor’s and that it was fun for people who like to explore space and fight. Always look at recent reviews and user comments to get the most up-to-date and complete picture of how Everspace 2 is being received as a whole.

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