EVERSPACE™ 2

This game satisfyingly fulfills my urge to pilot fighter ships and have dogfight in space. The graphics are absolutely breathtaking, flying through nebulae or in-between ice asteroids, with stunning lighting and great artstyile. All ships are satisfying to pilot, and weapons have beautiful particle effects and satisfying mechanics. The arcadey piloting style and the ships designs are interesting and you can customize them to your liking not only color scheme, but module appearance. Menus and interface are well design and usability is great for both keyboard and mouse. All in all one of the most polished releases and well designed games, especially considering the tendencies in recent years,

Space faring and combat is generally enjoyable in this game but the mission designs are just incredibly badly made. The balancing is very often off and the mission indicators and descriptions are outright confusing. I get the idea that the game tries to not spell the quest objectives outright, but the quest descriptions are too abstract to know what you are looking for at least and often the actual missions indicator give bad information instead of helping. The amount of wondering around until the time you stumble upon the objective feels like 1/2 of the play time in main missions that do not involved killing. The worse example of this was a missions that you need to escape from an underground settlement. The are 3 possible tunnels that you need to check and navigate. When you check the tunnel most end up in a dead end. The problem is that they are confusing to navigate, missions indicators do not update to indicated that you already need in a tunnel and even worse enemies re-spawn almost immediately, removing the last thing that you could have used to know which places you have already checked. It becomes tedious and grading. It is a shame this game could have been really good with simple simple common sense in mission design.

When you're an indie developer with only a kickstarter budget you have to accept you can't compete with the AAA behemoth companies at everything. The way to make it work is to pick what you're good at, find your niche, and focus on that. Which Rockfish have done really really well. Rather than investing huge amounts of money into character models and adding walking / FPS elements, they've said no this is a game where you explore a universe packed full of things to do, in a small spaceship, with plenty of action, and some RPG-esque development. In an engaging SP campaign with a decent storyline. So the cutscenes are done with comicbook-style drawings, and you can't get out and walk around. BUT it was a worthwhile cost saving to focus on what this game does well. The customisation in the controls is unparallelled, so whether you prefer mouse/KB/gamepad/flight-stick/HOTAS, or a combination of any of those, you'll be able to find a way that fits your preferred style perfectly. You can also adjust the difficulty, and the autoaim, to suit whether you want to just cruise through it for the experience or make it as challenging as you like. There's a nice range of enemies, the action sequences are fun and varied. Plenty of things to interact with in the environment. And you have a range of different types of guns, consumables, upgrades, crafting, abilties, etc to make the technicals interesting and exciting. You also have a variety of different ships to choose from all with varying pros and cons in the technical details. And a loot, merchants, storage, and inventory system which is a pleasure to manage. Despite not having the budget left for full digital characters, they've still put a lot of effort into story. The comicbook-style drawings are done really well, the voice acting is very good, and the timing of intercoms and cut scenes is spot on. It's enough to make you feel like you're there for a reason, to really immerse yourself in the fictional universe.

Yeah, the story and voice acting are pretty dreadful. Everyone's covered the action and they're right (it's great if you like this kind of game. The shooting, looting, look and style are all very good) so I'll speak to the glaring problem I don't mind the comic-like stills used for cut sceens, but they are not very good. The artwork is somewhat amateurish and the voice acting is VERY unprofessional. There are characters in this game that had me skipping dialogue as fast as I possibly could. They'd have been much better off with a scrolling text or any version of a "less is more" philosophy because my goodness some of the characters are quite grating. Also, a simple mechanic that has HUD icons change color and/or shape based on their distance would help this game immensely. There are times when the player's ship is inundated with enemies or PoI but it can be difficult to discern what is right in front of you and what is miles away. The parts I liked I loved, the parts I didn't really turned me off of this game.

This is by far the best spcae combat RPG since Microsoft released Freelancer in the mid 90's Excellent story, excellent gameplay, and a great storyline. My only compliant is the advertisement that recently showed up asking me for more money to get special ingame goodies. Come on, guys! I supported you in early access! I played this game all the way through before there was voiceovers! I sent feedback that helped you guys make this awesome game! You should be giving this content to people like me for free, as a thank you for helping make this game what it is today. Regardless, my butt ain't too hurt over it. Great game and 5 stars all the way around!