Good graphics but very shallow. Fails to deliver its proposed selling point (verticality and hydrodynamics). "A city-building game featuring ingenious animals, vertical architecture, river control, and deadly droughts." This is how the game is currently advertised. Unfortunately the verticality and water mechanics are more limited than most other city builders available. I wanted to love this, and I expected to since I love to manipulate water on my builds but it becomes boring fast even for someone that loves the genre. The verticality requires a big footprint for stair access and going for the smallest footprints requires you to have your buildings facing inwards, reducing your design freedom. There are many buildings that don't allow stuff built above. For instance you can't make a real world inspired dam, you can't make levees above platforms to make an aqueduct. The water mechanics are very limited, the above restrictions mean that you can't experiment with water pressure. While the game is beautiful looking the lack of freedom due to design choices removes a lot of replayability and kills a lot of creative design from players. It looks like it tried too much balance races at the cost of fun even though it's a single player. Map editor is a plus and it tries to fix this replayability issue but sadly the core loop limitations don't allow it to shine through. For players more focused on calamities/enemies to hinder your progress, there are no enemies and seasons are lackluster. Difficulty wise go with the hardest difficulty and if you survive the first 10min or so you won't ever die. While I love the graphics and what they tried to achieve with the game, sadly they came short and the game is one of the most limited of its genre. Its selling point is inferior to other games released several years ago like Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria and others that didn't have that sort of theme and Timberborn doesn't do anything better... unless you love beavers :)
I was loving the game on v0.4, the game ticks a lot of boxes, many things were done right so it seemed on the right track. Sadly, on v0.5 I can't recommend it anymore for a simple and yet so telling reason. Instead of developing the game, devs are already doing what we call "nerfing fun". Some changes were made to the combat and ship boost movement that made it sluggish and less fun. This just added an artificial layer of boredom for no purpose whatsoever, unless the idea is "hey you're playing the game too fast, it's still in development so slow down", which is also sad. To put this into perspective, this is a single player game without a difficulty setting. Their own words: "Everspace 2 is a fast-paced single-player spaceship shooter" So why nerf spaceship boost movement? I hope developers realize this is not the way and change it for the better and I can give a 5 star, but this behaviour early on is worrisome.
