Everspace 2
Everspace 2 is as good and so much more than I was hoping for. When I played the first game, what I really thought was "this would have been better as an actual full game rather than a roguelike" but they really have taken everything they learned from Everspace 1 (and the money) to develop what I think Everspace always should have been. It's an extremely highly polished space arcade looter shooter. The controls are great, the story is good, the voice acting is good, and all the weapons and ships feel great. It's also WAY bigger than I would have expected. I finished the game in about 40 hours, but I've barely visited 2 of the 7 systems, and done maybe 10% of the side quests.
Pros
- It really does look beautiful. It's basically impossible to take screenshots that don't look amazing
- Great voice acting
- Ship controls feel really good. They're very different to a lot of "space sims", but far more intuitive for this kind of game
- There are environmental puzzles all over the place, like how to break open a hardened mining patch, or how to open a sealed door
- Lots of modules, weapons and ship parts, all with levels and modifiers
- Each weapon is randomised, so having an uncommon beam laser at your level can have different stats
- Has an economy with commodity trading
- Random encounters popup between systems
- Jobs boards that grant reputation
- Player perks, and perks from NPCs which can be unlocked with craftable components
- Once you spend perk points on a device (like an EMP emitter) you unlock extra modes for it to further customise your playstyle
- 12 different ship classes, all with two alterative loadouts, in 4 tiers of power
- There's a wide variety of locations, ranging from "on planet" flying around on the surface, to asteroids, gas clouds, and very close to stars. The scenery is gorgeous everywhere
- You can dismantle 3 of the same item type to learn how to craft it
- Huge amount of ship appearance customisation options
- The dialogue with your AI companion genuinely made me laugh at one point
- Once you've done a certain number of side missions in a system, you can "fast forward" travel around in it
- It's only a small thing, but I love that each weapon has a different ammo/laser colour. It's not just that "beam weapons are green" but each beam weapon I used had a different light colour, like lightsabers
Cons
- Unlike an aerial combat game where you evade by flying evasively, that's basically impossible here. Enemies adapt to your new position almost immediately, so there's very little you can do to evade in open space. You can hide behind objects, but if you're outgunned, you're basically screwed
- There are mainframes (skill points) that you can unlock by discovering things, doing side quests etc, but they don't really have any meaningful effect. Dumping a full rack of points into one stat only increases it by about 5%
- I found a few ore nodes here and there that wouldn't disappear. Presumably there's some ore spawned under the surface that I can't shoot at