EVERSPACE™

The sale price is an incredible deal-get it. The physics are a lot of fun-moving in three dimensions with inertia! The varied weapon types are more than just skins unlike so many games these days, and there are more meta abilities gained from the ancients. It is a very linear game in some ways but open world in others. For instance choosing the next area to go to will not have many options, but once you are in an area you can go anywhere in it and do whatever you want. It is a roguelite type of game, you will die, buy upgrades and start another run. The couple graphical issues I have had seem to come from my ancient GPU, I don't recall any bugs, haven't had crashes. Someone who hadn't played the game complained about not enough player ship types...but each ship is completely different and they have hundreds of upgrades. It's taken me many many hours to fully upgrade a single ship. Space is beautiful.

Wow. First of all, I love roguelikes, but this is just an utter clustertruck. In handles like any other spaceshooter if you were injecting horse tranquilizers in one arm and cocain in the other beforehand. It's way too fast to hit literally anything and I played a a lot of shooters. The tutorial is a lame joke, half of the stuff is not explained, and half of what is explained makes no sense (e.g. tutorial tells you to repair something although you don't have the resources). The game is just all over the place in terms of GUI, controls and general handling, I even fail to see why it is called roguelike, because it tries to hold your hand at every step of the way, but fails to do that even. It seems like the creators constantly kept betraying their intentions and as such this game has a massive identity crisis, as it tries to fit space rpg, roguelike (which it isn't) and shooter under one hood and consecuteviley does a sad and poor job of it. There are probably hundreds of samey space rpg shooters that do a better job in all terms and don't handle like ass. I got this for free because of the christmas sale but boy oh boy would I be angry if I payed almost 30 bucks for this trainwreck of good intentions. Altogether, a lot of parts of the game would separately be technically good, some even excellent, but the way they are bind together is just messy and uncreative and bad handling and poor gameplay are the results.

First of all, yes I got this for free from the recent sale. Second, it is *quite* gorgeous to look at. But that's where the positive elements end, sadly. The game combines a very narrow cone of effective view (since enemies circle you in touching distance) with an underdeveloped first person cockpit view (and using external view sadly ruins the atmopshere). On top of that like some others have said it overdoes the whole "high difficult roguelike" because your shields break the moment you engage combat. Most roguelikes have a *dodge* or some other way of actively avoiding damage, this game forgot about one. And it doesn't help that combat itself is incredibly flat, coming down to drain shields -> kill, repeated ad nauseum. So yeah. Rather play *any* Dark Cells or Faster Than Light or Into The Breach or any other repeated-run game tbh. They're all better than this one. Pretty as it is.

I played Everspace with its expansion, Encounters, and found it completely underwhelming. On the positive side, it is as gorgeous as the pictures and videos suggest, and it can be played comfortably with a keyboard and mouse (it was actually more awkward with my controller). The combat can be satisfying, and each weapon has its own feel. However, after a few hours of play, you realize that the game is just a pretty arcade space shooter with no character or real story line. In general, you jump from randomly generated sector to sector and fight other ships that may or may not appear. When you eventually get blown up--which will happen many times even on easy difficulty--you respawn in a hanger and get to upgrade your ship with whatever loot you got during the last run. It could be an addictive, workable progression system, except it all feels like grinding in an empty space field for the same scraps each time. During my 3-4 hours of game play, a story did appear to be unfolding, but it seemed to be an afterthought--just enough to temporarily break up the monotony of cruising through quiet sectors. Dying over and over again is a core feature of the game, which has never appealed to me in any game. It's poor game design that reveals a certain lack of imagination on the part of the developers who should have really included a proper campaign and better level dynamics. This might be worth a try for $5. Otherwise, don't bother. The sad part is that this game could have been something special.

Fight. Explore. Survive. Awesome visuals, much more dynamic gameplay compared to "big name" space combat titles. Randomly generated maps full of dangers won't let you slack off. Great soundtrack and neat story, which even manages to nicely justify "rouge-like" nature of gameplay. Definitely worth about 20h of gameplay.