It has mechs and stomping about in a mech should be something thats always fun in a videogame. Missions are of a pretty decent length although they are interupted by mini cutscenes (unskippable) that point out the where the next objective is despite you having markers and a map. What makes these more annoying is that they trigger off certain events so enemies can still be alive, the game will also continue to play despite not allowing the player control and as a result you can find yourself surrounded and taking damage. A very obvious flaw that should never have got into the game and easily fixed. Viewpoint is fixed and as such subject to a lot of offscreen fire coming at you which isnt uncommon but does lead me onto my next MAJOR gripe and that is the targetting system. Using a controller to move feels betetr to me however the game selects targets for you and indicates this by a little red beam from the front of the mech, tank or chopper you happen to be inside at the time. Sadly this targetting will more often than not ignore the things right in front of your guns in favour of a building, not even a turret, thats way off to one side. For the chopper this becomes almost farcical and I eventually grabbed my mouse and use that to aim and fire. Worked as long as I wasnt trying to steer with the gamepad at the same time. Enemy variety is standard although flyers will appear and sit right above you meaning there's no way of hitting them unless you exit the vehicle and use your suits weapons. Made the ship boss fight with the steady flow of drones kind of dull and tedious more than anything. Then of course there's the escort missions which are some of the worst I've seen in a game like this. You start the NPC on their merry way and unless an enemy blocks their route they will not stop for anything or anyone. If you happen to be slower or need to grab ammo then too bad they will carry on regardless. I have the season pass but the game still shows those as locked!
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.
The visual aesthetic may look stylishly sparse, because it is, but the devs stuck to their guns and didn't choose to add things that go against that. Downside is that the consistency of visual style is maybe the best thing about the game. In a permadeath style dungeon crawler you'd maybe expect levels to flow nicely from room to room as you head through them searching out the exit and clearing as you go. The levels are however often a longwinded sprawl to begin with that only get smaller once you hit level 4 or 5. Because of this progression during a run seems to take much longer that it maybe should. At the start you get 3 random objectives which mostly involve killing a certain enemy a set number of times. Completion rewards you a token which can be used to unlock tomes or a gold chest at the end of each level/start of the next. However you can easily hit level 5 before seeing the required enemy so often the chest loot just isn't accessible. Currently no multiplayer on GOG but from what I've seen of it being played the difficulty swings from one form of tedium to another. In single player the tedium comes from the sprawl of levels and mobs that will respawn behind you for no apparent reason, sometimes entire rooms multiple times. In multiplayer any difficulty from combat is removed by having multiple people and the fact that there's no apparent limit to the number of times a dead party member can be brought back. Not that combat is particularly difficult once you learn timing on shield-bash. There's no save & exit option but there is an autosave every so often so I presume you can just stop a run. However for myself that's not something I like to do in permadeath games. Downside is a single run takes forever to get done. I don't like giving negative reviews for games but honestly this is a game that I sit down and play a run of and once I die don't feel the desire to jump back in and go again right away. Closer to a few days later.
