EVERSPACE™

I love Rogue-likes, and I love arcadey flight sims. This game definitely has a learning curve but nothing major. I started playing in beta and my first few runs felt like I was never going to get out of the first sector, but as you play you get better at dog fighting and figure out how to deal with corvettes and bigger threats. I'm not really a fan of the 'die and then get a boost the next time you play' mechanic but it isn't a huge buff, what I'm trying to say is like a good rogue-like it is more about learning the game not just grinding perks until you are allowed to finish. though, luck is of course a factor too. sometimes you find an awesome weapon straight away, sometimes nothing. the graphics are gorgeous. you can watch a let's play and see for yourself. the sound is enjoyable, though I've been listening to the TRON sound track while playing and it fits even better in my opinion. The voices fit the setting and haven't gotten annoying yet. I haven't finished the story yet, so I won't comment on it. seems decent so far. all in all I'm very pleased with it. the exploration and space combat aspects should keep me coming back for years. if only No Man's Sky had been more like this.

I was expecting a game like Freelancer. But unfortunately it´s very far away from this masterpiece. It´s just flying arround, shooting enemies and visiting space stations. In every sector it´s nearly the same, no real story comes with this game. Enemies are mostly muc stronger due to flying in groups. If you want a REAL space sim, buy the good old Freelancer.

The settings in this game are beautiful. The controls are intuitive and the combat well flushed out. It even has a decent narritive the helps keep you engaged. The possible ship choices are a bit limited but that's not a game breaker. However, the game starts to fall apart at its self-defeating mechanics. Like any game, you push through tough fights in order to stay alive and be rewarded. But in Everspace, you're not rewarded until you die. As in you literally do not have the opportunity to upgrade your ship until your current ship explodes. You gain money by playing the game but you're not able to really spend it until you die & upgrade your ship; and anything you don't spend, you won't get to keep - you'll lose it when you respawn. The same goes for the crafting based upgrades. Ignoring that adding a crafting mechanic to this kind of game doesn't add any depth, in Everspace it has been made into a time sink for temporary upgrades, really just creating an uneeded, unending grind because once you ultimately die in order to upgrade your ship, you'll lose all of your crafting ingrediants & start back at step one. It's an interesting dynamic for self created difficulty but this system of leveling up on death rewards the player for failure and fails to reward the player for success. I do think some people will really love this but as an objective product, it's a major flaw.

The gameplay is "Descent"-style combat in rouge style, means you're meant to fail and try again with higher attributes. The game refers to it as a RUN which is the right word. The questionable part is the algorithm that decides what obstacle it puts in your way to prevent you from advancing. In essence the game is short. You traverse 6 sectors on your way to sector 7 while jumping locations via a map. In each location you're doing the same thing, collecting resources to craft consumables like missiles, having dogfights with other ships just to flee from their unlimited reinforcements and jump to the next location. The locations are generated at the start of each sector, basically asteroids, ship wrecks, small stations etc. You need to reach Sector 7 at least 5 types to finish the game which becomes a source of constant frustration after a while. The mentioned algorithm is efficient at lengthening the play-through time even though the game essentially does not have much content. Unless you're into the genre, skip this title.

I gave it a good try, I got to the 4th sector (of 7 I think), but I uninstalled the game in frustration. Dying is what allows you to spend your credits on upgrades, as well as what makes your blueprints and special items available for subsequent runs. Each sector is a little harder than the previous sector, there’s no RNG about it, and if you don’t die you can’t progress. No matter how good you get at the combat, you can’t finish a run without dying multiple times. This, I think, is what makes the game unsatisfying. There are a few other things, like how dialog with my ship AI and combat with other NPCs would sometimes overlap; the exclamation mark next to a new codex entry stopped going away when I read the entry; and the squad of alien ships that arrives after a few minutes, forcing you to move to the next node on the map. It’s too bad, because there were some stretches during my 16 hours there that were fun and intense.