Everspace 2
Be nice to Freelancers, they may come back with homing missiles
When you start up a free-roaming space shooter, the last thing you expect is to be flying down a tight and twisting tunnel, in search of something called the ‘core’. There are anemone-like creatures all over the walls, and they fall easily to your ship’s lasers.
You don’t even know who you are at this point, referred to as just ‘the wingman’ on comms, but once you’ve defended the core, and the miners trying to exploit it, from a giant drill that lets in angry drones, you’ll be slightly closer to finding out.
This is the closed beta of Everspace 2, the final stage before its Early Access release in January. The game is running from the gravity well of Cyberpunk2077, rescheduling from a December release that saw CD Projekt’s own delay threaten to crush it. The other side of Christmas, the theory is, it can shine.
And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. While the prototype build looked like a game, but revealed that it wasn’t when you picked away at the surface, the beta has more ships, more characters, more plot, more infinity. The voices are provided by a text-to-speech app right now before the voice-acting is added, and sound like you’re being lectured by jerky robots, but the game has something extra: it hangs together right now as a scripted experience rather than a collection of disparate areas in space.
A SHOT IN THE DARK
Freelancer, from 2003, is still very much the reference, but while that game tended toward long wheeling dogfights where the objective was to get on your opponent’s tail and stay there, in Everspace 2 there’s always something in the way—be it an asteroid or the rotting superstructure of a long-abandoned industrial facility. The ability to move vertically up and down plays into this, making it possible to hide and pop up to surprise your target— particularly useful when hunting defense turrets or getting close enough to a jammer to disable it. Bandit craft and their drones scatter everywhere, leaving threat markers spread across your HUD. Long cutting beams fill the void, the red trails of missiles burning toward targets, and if you’ve got the right gun equipped you can join in with the light show, dazzling pink projectiles arcing toward enemy ships.
And while the voices may be placeholder, the glorious cosmic backgrounds, crystalline caves and floating wreckage—as well as the chunky fighters you pilot—are looking extremely good. Special mention too for the sparse cutscenes rendered to look like paintings.
Rockfish Games’ decision to delay is a positive one, then: a launch with more polish at a dry time of year, avoiding the gravitational waves of a big release, could be exactly what the game needs.
CUTTING BEAMS FILL THE VOID, THE TRAILS OF MISSILES BURNING TOWARD THEIR TARGET