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 456
The best space-sim sub-genre since Freelancer. Yes, it's THAT good. What type of game is it?
Freelancer + ARPG (ex. Diablo 2 or Titan Quest style) + some light puzzles
PROS:
- breathtaking visuals
- great soundtrack; from subtle sci-fi beats to almost melancholic synths
- optimization (which is rarely good in this day and age)
- QA done right, aka. no visible bugs
- looting - inventory, crafting, upgrading
- action - fast, but not chaos, with boosts/powers etc. as in ARPG spells alternatives
- solid trading system
- exploring secrets is rewarding + you'll get bonus creds and XP for clearing the location
- story isn't in your face not to discourage exploration but is fairly interesting
- devs were very brave not 100% listening to fans and bring Freelancer 2.0 but also taking some good advice into consideration
- ship custimization
- mining done right, not overwhelming or tedious
- interesting, non typical for this type of games locations and story segments (won't spoil, you'll see at 2nd system)
- PC friendly - plays amazing with KB+mouse, 1st person camera with and without cockpit, 3rd person, adjustable FOV, DLSS, lots of options...
CONS:
- random encounters aka. "unknown signal" could be more diverse - NOTE to DEVS - please add some variety and more mystery to it, thank you!
Steam User 192
I love the game, and while the developers insist scaling enemies to your level is the way to go, it's my least favorite feature. What's the point of taking on missions and murdering destroyers if it doesn't make you stronger than your opponents?!? It's still a game worth buying, but every time I upgrade my weapons/armor/systems/shields (which are all GREAT upgrades to choose from) I just remember every instance I encounter is going to make sure my upgrades are useless.
Steam User 131
I've sank 150 hours into this release and just got to the current story end. No, it won't take that long just to complete the story and side quests. You'll find in this game that time is mostly used trying to solve each maps' puzzles. It's a good game, but some flaws do exist (especially with inertia dampeners off) and many of them are from puzzle complications.
Elite Dangerous FA-off pilots: you can play this.
Positives:
Story really is the driving force of gameplay, meaning you don't actually have to grind out levels or 100% the maps to get through the game. You can choose to stick to the story and some side quests for whatever you need. Obviously, going this route means you won't get every perk, you likely won't find enough upgrades to roll enemies, and you definitely won't be able to try out the current end-game rifts.
Flying and combat both feel good. If you keep inertia dampeners on, whether you use 1st or 3rd-person camera, you won't notice most of the issues. Targeting can be forgiving and the settings are nicely adjustable. Enemies are not going to be pushovers, either; NPCs are pretty intelligent. Everything feels smooth and engaging.
Weapon options are nicely varied. My favorite weapons have been: Union High-Velocity Flak for AOE, Union High-Velocity Blaster or Maverick Powerful Coil Gun for serious damage, Mining-enhanced Beam Laser for mining, and Swift Rail Gun for range. After trying all the secondary weapons, the only options that seemed useful enough to never drop were Homing Missiles, Destabilizer Missiles, and Cruise Torpedoes. Look for these with 'Cannot be damaged' and "Cannot be intercepted' passives.
Ships at this point go up to tier 3+ (likely higher later on) and around the end of the game can be much easier to find the variation you want (passives can be swapped from one generated list to a second before buying and the full ship list can be regenerated once every 10 minutes). I've only bothered using 3 types because of what they provide. You start with a Sentinel and I'd recommend sticking to that for a bit, then looking into an Interceptor for more primary and secondary slots (I also like the unique passive and list of other passives far more) or the Gunship (probably the best unique passive, doubling your primary weapon hardpoints).
Ship perks and devices are also nicely varied. I won't list my favorite perks (the player perks have you choose 1 of 3 options every 5 levels, but the crew perks you can just unlock all of them), but I generally stuck with 2 warfare and 2 support devices. The EMP and Viral warfare devices, then one heal and one escape device, depending on situation.
The puzzles can be interesting. The removal of dynamic leveling in most areas and situations (one of the patches did this) makes clearing a map feel generally fine. You may feel a bit frustrated by the consistent enemy waves, but they're always 3k+ km out and don't just immediately make a beeline to you. The game has easier puzzles at the start to give you an idea of what to expect later on. One of the more frustrating puzzles (timed asteroid explosives) generally falls off the further you go.
Negatives:
Story plot armor is a bit annoying, but understandable in most situations. I think the biggest annoyance came during a follow/chase mission. You have to stay within a specific distance of someone and it felt incredibly bad to fail this just because you lost sight of which tunnel the person went down. It was much worse for me, though, since the physics can be a large hindrance (more about that below).
The sensitivity of keyboard and mouse is too high, and this is so much worse with inertia dampeners off. While the mouse part is adjustable, the keyboard keys need to lose about 30% sensitivity. The physics are also incredibly bouncy, meaning if you hit something with any part of your ship, no matter how lightly, the game responds by throwing your camera very roughly. With how unforgiving these two issues can be, ships with the highest handling can actually feel worse than the lower handling ships. If you use K&M and are also bothered by the sensitivity, try lower handling ships until it feels better.
The headlights are just horrendous. Seriously. This is mostly a problem in 1st-person with the ship cockpit showing. They treat it like a flashlight being held rather than a spaceship with headlights and multiple lighting devices meant to help stop you from dying in the darkness of space. I'm sure they thought this was atmospheric or something, but it doesn't have enough practical use this way. It also defaults as turned on rather than off. A very odd choice, but since it's so terrible, you can hardly notice it. It only adds to the frustration of the tunnel areas when you hope to brighten things up by pushing the headlights button, only to remember they're already on...
Another 1st-person specific issue is when carrying an item, there's no transparency to it. So with or without cockpit showing, you have most of the middle of your screen completely blocked, and even with cockpit off, something like a protector orb has animation to it that smothers your view almost entirely. I've ran into so many walls in the tunnel areas because of this and you're usually on a timer. Incredibly annoying.
Some puzzles are just too complicated. Not because "my brain doesn't understand" complicated, but because adding more red buttons to randomly shoot in a specific order is dumb. Some of these have details that show you which to shoot and when. Those are fine and actually cool when you notice what the giveaway is, but they're too few, given how many puzzles exist. Asteroid explosives (mentioned above) will sometimes feel like you have only JUST enough time (one in particular had a very large asteroid and 5 explosives to set with basically a one-second buffer for each, based on my pretty adept flying).
I think the worst part of the game is map clearing. It's one thing to have 3 or 4 puzzles and maybe 1 or 2 hidden caches per map. It's quite another to have 22 hidden caches, 2 invisible caches, and some shadow monsters or whatever on a map that has loads of verticality, tunnels, and dark spaces. Yes, you should give people the option to spend time on maps, but just take a look at my hours played and know that I only found around 70% or so of every hidden thing.
The other major issue for me, as an inertia dampeners off pilot, is that the puzzles are ABSOLUTELY built with dampeners on in mind and ONLY with them on. One specific point in the main story requires you to hack into a drone and pilot that instead of your ship through some wind tunnels. It is, and I'm not exaggerating, impossible to complete without dampeners. I didn't even realize that was the problem until about try number 30. There are puzzles that force your ship through these same sorts of wind tunnels, as well. Again, with dampeners, you just hold reverse throttle or forward throttle and you'll be generally fine with control. Without dampeners? There's no control at all. Throttle control is essentially turned off. It just flings your ship and you have to hope you don't explode on impact with the wall that you WILL hit.
Current end-game rifts are timed and super annoying. I didn't even bother after a few attempts, since legendary equipment is useless given the current state of the game. Full Superior with or without Prototype/Starforged will give you all the punch and survival you need.
Conclusion:
Good game with solid gameplay mechanics, adjustable settings, and a decent enough story, but serious issues for dampeners off pilots, some 1st-person issues, a terrible flashlight meant for Resident Evil players, and map clears that become too complicated for their own good. The negatives can be fixed (if they read this review), but I think most players will accept what exists and enjoy the game a lot. Just don't get burned out trying to 100% every map. It really is incredibly tedious.
Steam User 124
Love this game so far. I'm a casual gamer; kids, work, commitments, I get a couple of hours on the weekends to play so this game fits into my lifestyle well.
I've always liked scifi and this game 100% scratches that itch. The flight style is very arcadish, but I view that as a positive. It lowers the barrier to entry. There is a setting to turn on/off inertial dampeners which makes it a little more realistic. But don't expect it to turn into a flight sim. I like the bright colors and interesting locations. The plot is interesting to me so far as well.
I've also always liked RPGs, especially min/maxing interesting characteristics. A lot of people call ES2 a Diablo in space. It's a pretty accurate, high level assessment, but I'd say this game is maybe a tad more forgiving in some ways. There are very few, if any decisions that leave you feeling locked into a particular niche.
I took a chance on this game because of the demo. I was a little hesitant to invest the time but at least there was no $$$ needed. The demo lets you do the first bit of the plot for free. You're capped to level 5 and stuck in the starting system but the mechanics of the game are otherwise unrestricted. There's no time limit on the game. Demo progress does translate into the full game if you decide to make the purchase.
Hope this review helps you make a decision.
Steam User 203
I will make this short:
Looking for that cure for the "Freelancer"- itch? You may found it here.
Everspace 2 is a evolved version of the predecessor game. The Shoot & Loot with small to medium sized fighters -formula still stands and forms the main focus of the game. On top of that there's a basic trading system in development which addition I personally approve a lot. The story is entertaining and you're able to explore the universe on your own - which you also need to level up to progress further. The gameloop is good in that aspect. Some side-missions or jobs (more the later) may appear a bit repetetive though.
You can buy several ships and "build a fleet" of ships you can switch between. Size ranges from small fighters and scouts to Gunships/Bombers.
It's a great game so far and Rockfish did really well in my opinion. Looking forward to version 1.0.
Steam User 144
This game is to flight space sims what NFL Blitz is to football games. It's fast, frenetic, and chaotic in battles. It's beautiful and sometimes awe inspiring when you're cruising through the solar systems. Never played the first one, doesn't seem to matter. I've enjoyed early access a great deal and cannot wait for this to release in 1.0 in fifteen minutes. I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys arcade-y space shooters or if you remember Freelancer and enjoyed that title. Be well and take care.
Steam User 131
3 hrs in:
Love this game. Probably one of the best casual space games out there.
I do wish they'd figure out seamless transitions between jumps or arriving at destinations though. Even something blatant like Elite Dangerous loading screens is better than the full blackout thing this does. Besides that, no complaints.
10 hrs in:
Still fresh, this game is messing with my sleep cycle now. Apparently you can toggle inertia dampeners (flight assist) on or off by setting a keybinding, glad to know that if you wanna play with "realistic space physics", you can. Even better now. Ship go weeeeeee.
24 hrs in:
What is sleep? What is work? Just a period of time when you're not playing Everspace 2.