EVERSPACE 2

Everspace 2 is a game of grand ambition and perhaps the legacy of the first game kinda taints it in a certain way. The first game was a roguelite where you would constantly start over and over again, while Everspace 2 is more of a grand space adventure in the vein of big RPGs. It's a little surprising that this isn't called some type of a RPG, because I found many similarities with a game like Skyrim except it's all in spaceships. Perhaps it's just the nature of space games to not really be RPGs? Anyway Everspace 2 is a great game, and definitely should have a bigger audience.

You can do a lot in this game. There is the main quest to follow, but you are free to explore all these optional locations where you will find loot, gather XP via battles or just find some unexpected things. You'll want to upgrade your ship's equipment which has lots of slots (primary weapons, secondary weapons, 6 main components and also usable devices) and it's all about that incremental progress. Mining materials are required to upgrade perks or craft some material, you will definitely never run out of things to do. I enjoy the cartographer aspect of it as I tend to go and explore all of the locations before heading on forward to the main quest, and even there I have left many things behind that I didn't finish cause there's just too much. The combat in space is pretty fun, very key on knowing your weapon ranges and to plan accordingly your strategy around them and since there's so many different options you can always customize your equipment to your liking more.

Rockfish isn't exactly an AAA developer, but they really aimed high with this one and did great with what I assume was limited resources. The graphics are pretty good, all the dialogue is fully voiced (and there's tons of it), cutscenes have this nice comics look to it and it's great how all of the games systems are interconnected and work well together. The game is not without its faults (balancing and level scaling issues can be an annoyance) but overall I felt that there's is a lot more great things than bad ones in this game, and I haven't played much that resemble it. Back when I was a teenager, Wing Commander Privateer was a favorite that I used to play at a friends house and a lot of the same liberties from that game are found in this one, except of course this is with much more technology and concepts.

I'd say give it a try even for those that didn't consider the first one to be good, this game is really completely different and perhaps really only the combat is similar and the rest is just a whole other game totally. Be prepared to invest a lot of hours into it, I've completed the game and I clocked in 46 hours (I did take my time to smell the flowers a lot, but even a faster play through would still require at least 30 hours to complete the campaign) and it was really fun to be into the Everspace world all this time. I assume Starfield will take a lot of its shine away when that releases, but I am looking forward to comparing the systems in both of these games and seeing what Everspace 2 possibly does better. One of the gems of 2023, slightly under the radar compared some of the bigger titles but this game has a lot more ambition than many of them.