The game isn't bad, but just a minor improvement of the predecessor, which suffered from the same problems dragging down the experience. Not worth the full price, maybe get it when it's on a sale for under 10 dollar. First, exploration feels shallow. The "lore" of the planet exploration is interesting to read at first, but feels AI generated. It's text pieces that will give you some random resources as a reward and 99% of the exploration has no connection to the world or to other exploration. After 4 hours, only one time did it have a connection to the world and that was just asking me to "talk to someone". After a while, it becomes repetitive, as I just can't feel connected to the random text I am reading and it feels like all I'm doing is look at AI generated pictures and click the accept button. Next, the combat is bad. Since it happens so often and can't be avoided, it should feel great and fun, which it doesn't. The ship turning is very finicky with keys (making fixed weapons a pain to use), so I chose to turn to mouse cursor - but that is very unresponsive and doesn't precisely recognize the cursor movement, forcing you to often shake the mouse around to get the ship to turn. Not that it would matter anyway, as the best way to do combat is to aggro the enemy and then just fly backwards shooting at them until they are dead.. Then there are just plain bad design decisions, like some keys being hardcoded (why are devs still doing that?). I wanted my fixed weapons to fire on my right mouse key, instead it's hardcoded to targeting (which doesn't do anything), so now I always get a giant marker over the enemy obscuring other enemy ships, making my right-mouse key basically useless. You also get a few immersion breaking visual bugs, like flickering outlines around the planet atmosphere, which should have been fixed before release, but at least no gamebreaking bugs so far. There are a lot other problems, but the GOG review limit doesn't let me write any more..
It's an okay game that looks & sounds amazing, but is gameplay wise pretty shallow. The beginning feels great, the combat is punchy, you find lots of loot and the story is cool with the buddy character. I imagined I could play this forever.. Until I left the first star system and I realized I have already seen everything the game has to offer. The problem of Everspace 2 is A) the simplistic gameplay: every mission is either "kill this enemy", "go to point A and fetch x item" or an annoying puzzle like "find energy sphere and drop it into an empty socket". B) The combat is very repetitive, because the enemy AI is plain stupid and will always just try to swarm you, making them easy predictable targets. Raising the difficulty doesn't help either, as it will only make the enemies into bullet-sponges, but not make them smarter & more challenging - aka it only takes "longer" to kill them. And C) the lacking content: for a looter-shooter, there just isn't enough "loot". You get 9 spaceships, which don't substantially change the combat nor gameplay, a bunch of unlockable blueprints and colors, and 10 weapons (plus a bunch of missiles). All of this you will unlock in the first star system, after that it's just slight stat increases. Once you completed the first star system, you've pretty much seen everything the game has to offer - besides the different environments. Sadly even the environments don't really offer much variety besides different visuals. Yes they look absolutely great, but it's just a different paint of the same: in every location you will find some resources to farm, loot-boxes placed there for your convenience and the same copy-pasted puzzle. Maybe worse of all, the story takes an unexpected turn at the end of the first star system, which left me feel really disconnected to it and thus removed a main motivation to "keep going". So my suggestion is, wait for a sale. It's a well-polished, but sadly also very shallow game.
Sadly, this is just not a good game and in it's core is simply boring. First, the "story" campaign: it's just a few dialogues and then you have to play the same map over and over again. After that all you do, again, is fight the same few monsters in the same few room types, which always look exactly the same. It's extremely repetitive and sadly very unimaginative. What makes it worse is the monsters AI being really stupid. You have two enemies, a melee and a ranged one; This wouldn't be a problem if the monsters wouldn't be so easy to cheese. The melee enemies always run straight at you and then have a delay to their attack, making it possible to run through large groups of enemies without ever worrying to be hit. And the ranged enemies only hit you if you stand still. In fact, I never died once in the time I played this. Thus I never felt in danger, even at higher levels. This problem also comes from how insanely overpowered the character gets, and ranged AOE attacks are the only thing you will ever need. Because of the dumb AI, I never bothered with defense skills or using better armor gear ... instead, I always chose what gives me the best attack damage. Sadly the character customization is also far less impressive than it first seems, as you only get a few skills for each character, which in the end don't really differ that much in effect, and the other customization (also the "weapons") is minor in effect at best ... nor is it actually needed because you can kill every monster in the game with the standart starter attack. So if you are looking for a challenging Diablo clone, look elsewhere, because this is not it. The devs really don't understand character development, balance or what makes aRPGs like Diablo so great. All you really do in this game is oneshot the same few monsters in the same rooms over and over and over again. That is all there is to this game. I only give this 2 stars because it works.
