EVERSPACE™

OK. It's a arcade rogue-lite. It's NOT a flight sim in any way. Blah blah blah, you'll die a lot. But you'll learn about the game as well, too, with each iteration. If you stick with it, there's a very natural learning curve, and soon enough you'll find that you've become a mechanized stellar storm of destruction. For example: picture single-handedly taking on an alien fleet of interceptors and capital ships as a flame-throwing, in-fighting, glass-cannon shieldless berserker snubfighter. Forget being like a leaf in the wind. I am become chaos. I am entropy embodied. I am the mechanized, rabid, pissed-off, 'roided-out hornet hell-bent on total annihilation that my foes do not want to spot on their rear-view mirror (objects are larger than they appear). Did I mention that this was a good way to stress-bust after a nasty day at work? Sometimes I just wanna watch things go boom. :-D

20 hours into this game and I'm hooked. First off, this game is not really that difficult, but you can't blindly fly into a dogfight without a plan. There are so many ways to handle the combat depending on your loadout. I personally go with the scout because of the speed and tools available. You can snipe from afar, hack enemy drones and fighters to fight on your side, zoom around rocks and hide inside larger rocks and debris, lure enemies into hazards or opposing factions, or cloak and they'll never even see you coming. Taking out larger battleships with a tiny x-wing-like fighter feels like something straight out of Star Wars. I'm sure the other ships all have their own merits that I haven't discovered yet. Exploration is the other great thing about this game; every time I play, I discover something new and game changing. There's a lot more out there than it seems at first. Do yourself a favor and discover it for yourself instead of reading about it. Although, this review is based on the DLC which I bought at the same time as the main game. Definitely pick that up, I think it adds a lot. The polish is all there. The visuals are wallpaper worthy, controls are solid, sound effects and explosions feel awesome, and the framerate is silky smooth on epic settings on my Alienware 13 R3 laptop. Dying in this game isn't a let down at all, because you really want to spend those credits on ship and pilot upgrades, load up some new equipment, and get back out there again. That's what makes taking risks so fun. Every time I die, it never feels unfair, and I usually think of at least one or two ways I could have handled the situation afterwards. Here's a tip: you can pause the game at any time and craft things to help you in a fight. After 20 hours, each game feels totally unique and rewarding. I don't know how long that will last but it's already been worth every cent.

I bought into Everspace during the alpha which does mean I don't have the DRM free lovliness of GoG however that doesn't alter the way the game plays in any way which should be the point of a review. Visually the game is very appealing to look at and the devs are making good use of UE4 as the screenshots show. When your ship takes damage it starts to smoke and looks battlescarred if you're playing in third person while internally displays will flicker and fade and the canopy gets ominous cracks forming in it. The basic loop of gameplay is jumping into a sector, killing what needs to be killed, looting what you can find and getting out before the bad guys arrive which happens after a certain amount of time. To aid you in this you can craft scanner probes which will highlight all the collectibles in that zone. Usually these are spaced out in such a way that you have to consider which ones are more vital. Upgrades can be found this way but more often that comes from the remains of enemy ships. There are also blueprints, that carry over, which allow you to craft systems if you have the stuff needed. Everything can be salvaged so while the raw materials may not be there at first glance it's not as big of a hurdle as it may seem. Combat can be tricky at first when you start off but does become easier once a kill order is worked out. If you have shields then beam ships are a priority where as if you're going down the shieldless route then the physical damage dealers become more important. It may just because I enjoy space games but I find the "death levelling" in Everspace to be far more enjoyable than in Rogue Legacy, still haven't put my finger on why though. By death levelling I mean the process of buying perks. After a run is over you can spend your earnings on the perks before strapping in and keeping going. It can take a few runs before results really start to show but the basic tier of perks that are open to a player includes one that boosts income.

I have this on steam. It ran fantastically. This was a good game. Definitely a very nice looking game and it had a lot of great things going for it: The combat was intense The ships(different kinds to choose from, a unlock as you go kind of game) looked great and had different playstyles Multiple kinds of weapons/tech to use Intriguing story(albiet very narrow once you know what's going on but a headscratcher until the end) Environments were very well done. The "skybox" looks fantastic. There's debris everywhere to explore. Even black holes and alien entities. My biggest problem with the game was the combat and how the game handled progression: When you start the game, u enter ur ship and go into a randomly spawned area where you fly around and kill bad guys, find upgrades, etc, then you leave that zone to go to the next one. All good but my problem is if you take too long bad guy fleets show up and can basically obliterate you. So you're FORCED to leave the area even if you haven't found everything yet. I didn't like that. To top it off, AI are very accurate. It doesn't matter how you bob/weave you can not escape the weapons onslaught and your shields are instantly gone along with half ur hull. I found the best(and rather OP tbh) build was to play "sniper" and kill them from long distance cuz frankly dog fighting late game was akin to suicide. So VERY nice n' fun game it just had some downsides. If u like space shooters like Freelancer, you'll probably like this game. Get it on sale and try it out. I wouldn't pay more than $15 for it though tbh.

Everspace is a bit hard to define, because it puts a spin on the classic space combat game making it random with persistent upgrades like in Rogue Legacy. That works mostly, as the gameplay is varied and you will never really know what to expect, but the mid game grind gets really really tiresome, as you cannot really speedrun (you really need fuel) so it takes almost an hour to get to the first guardian.