EVERSPACE 2
In space, nobody can hear you go “YEE-HAH!”
WHILE ELITE: DANGEROUS has its charms, we can’t put our finger on a space shooter that’s really got under our skin since Freelancer— and that was an embarrassingly long time ago.
And while the first Everspace was a fairly simple affair, in which you fought battles to accumulate credits and ship parts, but lost all except the cash if you died, this sequel has made the excellent decision to explore thirdperson open-world RPG territory, having Kickstartered itself into orbit.
It’s also in Early Access, which means the game is not finished, and the expected completion date is sometime in 2022. Getting into a game—particularly paying money for one—at this stage is a risk, as you’re likely to encounter bugs, and have your save wiped by a patch that changes something deep within the game’s workings, but it also gives you the chance to experience something before anyone else, and guide its development by giving feedback.
Your character, Adam, is a clone. Produced by some sort of military program to be a natural pilot, you are the end of the line—your memories are those of all your clone-fathers, but somehow the cycle has become broken, and if you die, you die for good. That’s how it’s explained in one of the very early missions, anyway, but we’ve seen enough clones in our time to know they’re an easy way of providing a player with extra lives, so we wouldn’t be surprised to find a new body staggering out of a vat of goo once we’ve advanced far enough. That’s speculation, however, as at the moment, if you die, you have to reload your last save, which tends to be back at home base before you’ve left for your latest mission—a system of mid-mission checkpoints would be most welcome.
Those missions are central to the game, as there’s no wandering around without at least one on your list. Your base tasks you with going here, finding that, and inevitably shooting something else, while you can also pick up bountyhunting side missions too. Character development is limited to your ship, rather than its pilot, and there’s a huge range of weapons at your disposal, to be bought or found floating in space. Even as your character levels up, the perks he unlocks are reflected in your ship, not the invisible lump of meat behind the stick. The developers clearly know that what people want to see are brightly colored bolts of energy streaking toward their target, and you certainly get that, along with homing missiles, autocannon, space shotguns, and a degree of auto-aim that verges on the psychic (and which can be turned off in the options).
ON THE FLY
The ships are agile, capable of boosting, rolling, dodging laterally, and pitching around in looping dogfights that, we suspect, might not be particularly gravitationally accurate but look great and are an absolute blast to fly. And this turns out to be one of the great strengths of Everspace2— it’s simply a lot of fun to play. Ships even have StreetFighter- like Ultimate abilities that are charged as you destroy enemy ships, and can be released in a one-shot
electric death supernova with the tap of a button. Abilities, which can be offensive or defensive, range from ship repairs and boosts to your power core to shipstunning EMPs or bursts of ramming speed, and are slightly more involved: You need to press two buttons. At the same time. Don’t worry, it’s really not that complicated.
Lacking the simulation qualities of Elite:Dangerous, you will not find yourself matching rotation speeds with a spinning space station in order to dock. Everything is done with the push of a button, from docking with traders to picking up power cores and slotting them into empty sockets to complete simple puzzles that reward you with loot. Your autopilot does the job of timing your exit from FTL travel for you, meaning you should never overshoot your target as you can in Elite, while its in-system fast travel, known as Cruise Drive, is simply activated and deactivated with a button-press.
And while it may be heavily shipbased rather than character-focused, that doesn’t stop companion characters with useful ship abilities from coming to your aid when you need them. Space itself is highly characterized and gorgeous to look at, with the crumpled wreckage of what looks like our own International Space Station spread over the orbits of giant planets, red blinking minefields like fireflies in the void, and the warping animations as capital ships’ shields regenerate meaning there’s always something to marvel at. Locations are hand-designed rather than procedurally generated, so while there might be a limited number of them, they’re packed full of secrets. Wreckage, which is a common sight, can frequently be explored in search of loot, crumbling walls knocked down with a missile to release the goodies trapped behind them. And as a product of the Unreal Engine, performance is good, too, with the recommended system specs surprisingly mild.
What you’re not going to do is build a universe-spanning empire or conquer the galaxy through trade, but the focus on combat and exploration suits us just fine. Updates to the current limited base game will be coming every few months, according to the devs. We played version 0.4.16428, but the list of additional features coming before 1.0 is long. It is easy to be positive about a game when it’s unfinished, when there’s no dull grind after the halfway point, or when promises that it’s definitely going to improve are yet to be broken. Everspace2, however, exudes a confidence and an exuberance that makes us think it’s going to keep its promises.