Everspace 2
EVERSPACE 2 puts you in the pilot seat in this fast-paced single-player space shooter, where vicious encounters and brutal challenges stand between you and that next epic loot drop. Explore the war-torn star systems of the Demilitarized Zone of Cluster 34—each massive handcrafted area is packed with secrets, puzzles, and perils to encounter.
Experience a thrilling sci-fi story following Adam, a clone pilot seeking his place in the universe. The events of his past tangle with clashing factions as the DMZ approaches a boiling point. Escape colonial capture, navigate the intrigues of local warlords, evade energy-maddened cultists, and fend off war-hungry aliens.
Adam will need more than wits, luck, and skill to survive—gather a team of experts to achieve his payday and finally achieve his dream of escaping the DMZ. Meet old friends and new allies, each with their own stories to tell. They will join you during missions, provide upgradable perks, unlock new abilities, and aid your path forward.
EMBARK ON AN EXCITING JOURNEY
Discover alien species, unveil mysteries, find hidden treasures, and defend your cargo against outlaw gangs in an exciting 30-hour campaign. Completionists can dive deep into the EVERSPACE universe and spend more than 90 hours to complete every side mission, finish every challenge, and discover every hidden secret.
LET THE LASERS DO THE TALKING
Annihilate your foes the EVERSPACE way. Dodge, dash, roll, and boost guns blazing into frantic dogfights, leaving a trail of space scrap behind. Use a wide range of weaponry and abilities to defeat drones, fighters, heavy bombers, and powerful gunships. But don’t get cocky! Massive capital vessels and ancient guardians will push the skills of even the most experienced pilots. Use your environment to your advantage, and gain the upper hand against greater numbers.
EXPLORE THE GALAXY
Enter the EVERSPACE universe and explore it at your leisure. The DMZ and surrounding areas of Cluster 34 are brimming with main and side missions, activities, events, and secrets to be uncovered. Fire up your hyperdrive to discover more than 100 unique, handcrafted locations spread across seven distinct star systems. and shape your legacy among the stars.
HAVE IT YOUR WAY
Expand your private ship collection from a virtually endless supply of fighters composed of unique classes to optimize your build to perfection. For a price, traders throughout the cluster will help you acquire improved models or send your current ship off for storage as you try a new ship type. Cleverly combine modules, weapons, devices, and perks to fit your individual playstyle and the current mission.
SEEK OUT SECRETS
Clever pilots are successful pilots. Loot outlaw caches, salvageable wrecks, and ancient hidden treasures scattered throughout every explorable area of the DMZ. Search structures, solve puzzles, blow up asteroids, and restore ruins to hunt down every one of these treasures.
EPIC LOOT AWAITS
Hunt for improved gear to expand your arsenal of powerful equipment combinations. Look for loot that fits your playstyle, but be willing to leave your comfort zone and try something new. Be ready to find and exploit synergistic effects between equipment, perks, devices, and ships to fully maximize their potential.
LET THE HUNT BEGIN
Completing EVERSPACE 2’s extensive campaign is not the end! Engage in high-octane endgame High-Risk Areas and Ancient Rifts that allow you to push your build and luck to the limit against progressively harder enemies. Succeed in a run to acquire legendary gear that holds immense power and extraordinary abilities.
Steam User 120
Top tier game, absolute class-act studio. Only studio I've seen in over 3 decades of gaming that voluntarily lowered the price on upcoming content to help their community in the face of international economic uncertainty.
To any Rockfish devs that see this; y'all are fucking legends. I hope each and every one of you the absolute best of success and just know that, at least one random dude out there, is going to buy the expansion just to support y'all on this decision alone. Keep on doing good in this world!
Steam User 53
It's Freelancer. Just a very good homage with an extremely tight gameplay loop that will disappear hours from your life. There's some jankiness here and there, mostly with things like Vindicator drones. Overall, the game is incredibly stable. There's a great central story to follow if that's your jam. There's a lot of freedom to explore, random events, semi-random events, location-based missions, etc.
No game is a 10/10 but this feels really close.
Steam User 37
It scratches the "Freelancer" itch, which in turn scratched the "Privateer" itch, which in turn scratched the original "Elite" itch... With that said you know 2 things: A) I am old... B) The game has a decent fun capable pedigree... I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Steam User 46
Love this game but puzzled at the inexplicable lack of native VR support. I played this a bit with UEVR and all I can say is that it's a game that is absolutely meant to be played in VR. The VR elevates the experience in such a huge way (especially during dogfight sequences) and I cannot believe that they decided not to include support for it. Huge missed opportunity.
I really enjoyed playing this with UEVR, unfortunately it's a hacky solution and it makes the parts where you warp between areas completely undoable which makes the game basically unplayable with it. I wish there was a way to skip those warp sequences because then it would at least be fully playable with UEVR.
This game is built on Unreal Engine which has VR functionality built into it already (that's what UEVR is tapping into). The fact that UEVR delivers such a good experience (in the parts of the game where it works well) as a hack shows that it probably wouldn't take much to get a proper implementation done for VR in this. Ever since Eve Valkyrie got shutdown VR players have been looking for this kind of experience, and this should be it. It just needs the support so that we're not having to rely on a janky workaround for it.
I saw that the developers had a thread going on some forum and people were being rude to them so they decided not to do a VR implementation. Those people in that forum represent a minority of VR users. I hadn't even been on that forum until I came across that thread a few minutes ago. I'm sorry you guys had a bad experience on there, but please don't punish the broader VR community just because of a few idiots. Thanks.
Steam User 44
Fun looter shooter type space Arcade Game.
Lots of exploring
Lots of puzzles
Economy is pretty simple, so if you're expecting a deep trade experience this isn't it.
Excellent story
Excellent voice acting
Steam User 17
Where do I begin.
A Sick Loop in Space
I played this when it was in early access in game pass back when legendaries weren't a thing. I think I clocked around 85 hours or so there, and purchased a steam copy since steam gets the "legendaries" update first. I estimate an extra 30 hours of offline playtime here on steam that's not logged into my total hours. I restarted the campaign on steam though since I would've jumped through hoops to continue my game pass play through. Maybe a majority of the time spent was on doing maps (a-la path of exile), exploring or just flying about, and eventually doing rifts when I decided to continue on with the story. But combat is extremely fun, and it's what actually what made me lose track of the story progress.. You can think of it as diablo in space or something, and it's done well. So well that I got stuck in an addicting loop of just doing maps, bounties, contracts, answering distress calls, and checking out new ships being sold in "town" and selling all the crap my tractor cannon picked up. Hell, I didn't even know there was a final tier of ships that could be unlocked until my final 10 hours of my game time. That was a neat surprise. The Rifts that got unlocked after I finished the story were a blast to farm as well!
Half a Sim
This game started off as a mix of diablo and skyrim, with a bit of cowboy bebop sprinkled on top. There's loot, plenty of enemies to shoot at, and some pretty neat exploring all while -personally- roleplaying as spike taking on bounties and contracts. This game eventually got me into trying out a dual stick setup with a couple of logitech 3d extreme pros, but eventually convinced me to get a couple of vkb glads both with omni throttle setups to feel like I'm piloting Spike's ship from the anime. Practical? nah. Fun? Hell yeah. I played this with both MKB and HOSAS, and it's definitely way harder with dual stick controls, especially on the hardest difficulty. But dang, if you have a couple of sticks, this game is begging you to use them due to the extensive control customization! Definitely one of the best control options in a lot of space games I've played. You can bind an alternate button to functions. You can bind conflicting buttons to multiple functions. You can bind modifiers to add to buttons as well. There's deadzone adjustments to every axis, not to mention sensitivity values. Hell, you can even combine keyboard or controller presses with your sticks if you want. and I cannot stress enough how fun this arcadey game feels with the inertia dampeners turned off. And hoo boy, the moment they added the option to "press inertia dampeners" instead of toggle made it so that it felt like a brake button was just icing on the cake. It's not a full on sim experience, but you can configure it to be a bit more of a hybrid of sorts, and I love it. It's just superb.
Dakka Dakka
And dear god, the ships and the weapons! I started off maining the device-oriented lightweight that kinda looks kind of like Faye's ship, which I thought was pretty OP and cool at the same time. Later on, I fell in love with the heavy gunship with all its... well, guns. 4 Autocannons ftw! Eventually, I switched on over to the bomber when legendaries started dropping. Gotta love that multi-missile launcher! And you can equip multiple copies of them that it's stupid! and with the intuitive control customization, it's a breeze to cycle between them. Damn, that's a fun time.
Man, I really want to thank the devs for this game. Looking forward to your next release/DLC.
The passion that went into this-
Just, thanks, Rockfish.
Steam User 27
TLDR: An excellent lightweight, fast-moving 3D space shooter with great biomes and lots of discovery.
I was a Kickstarter backer for the first Everspace game, and enjoyed it quite a bit, but it was a bit heavy on the roguelike elements for my liking. A little too challenging/tedious as a result, and after a fair amount of time, pretty one dimensional.
I was very pleasantly surprised when first playing Early Access for Everspace 2. Rockfish seemed to have taken the winning game engine and "looter shooter" formula that made Everspace 1 so enjoyable, but then oriented the game somewhat in the direction of the classic Freelancer - removing the roguelike nature of the game, adding in some lightweight trading, a fair number of missions, and a strong incentive for discovery. The result is probably one of my favorite lightweight space sims.
What's good:
- I like the tie-ins with the initial game. The setting is loosely the same. You've still got Adam Roslin's nature as a clone, the Okkar, the DMZ, the Ancients, and a number of recurring characters
- The action. I played on the standard difficulty, and only at a few points in the game was I defeated. Generally speaking, the game was of moderate difficulty if I was doing missions of my level and playing to my ship's strengths (using devices, all weapons, Ults, etc. to maximize my damage and survivability)
- The ships. With nine different (unless I'm confused) chassis allowing for a pretty good spread of play styles: from a rough and tumble dogfighter to a cloaked speed demon to a carrier full of drones that do the heavy lifting for you.
- The scenery. While there are only 7 or so explorable systems (and that seems small compared to certain games), I found the variety within to be very enjoyable.
- The discovery. Some complain about how boring the "puzzles" in this game are. Where there are puzzles, they are indeed pretty simplistic, but I think the emphasis is rather on completionism and finding everything. I challenged myself to try to get 100% on the most vast system in the game. It took awhile, but it was not a drag.
- The Challenges. While there could be more of them, these were also entertaining and rewarding to chase - and getting to fast forward cross-system flights was most helpful.
What's not so good:
- The story. It is very light, implausible, and frankly, just feels like the devs didn't bother.
- The dialog and characters. Thin, tawdry, unimpressive. HIVE at least offers a little bit of snarky comic relief.
- The comic strip-style narration. While I realize this was probably a much easier means of narrating some of the story footage, it felt hokey to me
- The rifts. They feel like the devs had a great time playing Diablo III and wanted the same thing in their game to scale difficulty and add better loot in the endgame. With an even dumber in-universe excuse for their existence.
- The "factions". These were a disappointment. They're really just different flavors of enemies.
- The "trading". At first I thought the addition of trade commodities was cool, but then I realized that the trade system is extremely simple and utterly predictable. Also, unless you've got the biggest cargo hold possible (these are fighting craft, not freighters, after all), I found that I could make money just as fast by running high risk areas and performing side missions.
A few general observations:
- This is very arcade-like. The controls are fluid and conducive to rapid, responsive combat. Do not mistake this for a space sim.
- I might have actually liked one character (Elek), if he didn't sound like a 13 year old with ADHD who was always trying to impress me and had zero self-awareness.
In all the negative I have to say about this game, you'll note that nowhere do I have any criticism of the core action of this game - and that's what it's all about. There's a solid amount of content and enjoyment in this game if you just want a fast-moving action-oriented space shooter that's easy to pick up and put down whenever you like, and doesn't have the roguelike constraints of the original.
I give this two thumbs up and will definitely play it again.