If i get a better, ie, functioning experience, when emulating a game instead of buying it, something is wrong. At least i can now emulate it without anyone claiming i pirated it.
Things that work: - Character Interactions. - Movement feels great. - Meele and most of the ranged weapons fel powerfull. Things that not work: - Diablo wana be in structure but the loot is utterly uninteresting, most of it being percentage uopgrades and the vaast majority being trash. - The levels are, similar to diablo put together randomly. And they are put together out of a relatively small number of assets. These assets repeat SO OFTEN they are becoming noise. - The Levels part2: due to them being made from assets the levels are devoid of individual character. This gets sometimes so bad that the player fequently looses oversight where they have been since everything looks the damn same. - Art Design is mostly okay, The shining beacon here is Card art and art pieces on the menues. When i see these i wished the game was about these creatures. In contrast to that are the High tech City levels. Assets scattered with no rhyme or reason. The Details are so noisy that they just get lost and some elements are so bright its hard to see the enemies in the area. its just a mess. - This game is extremely repetetive in all its elements. Even the best mechanics are no fun at nauseum. - The humor becomes obnoxious since it turns out that is the only the thing the games writers apparently are capable off. Lots of elements of the story also make no sense or are contradictory to the max. It becomes soon clear the story has just been written to fill the grind with even more noise. - Boring enemy and AI design. Most enemies can be killed simply by focusing them down. Some can't because they are funless bullettsponges not bc they are a mechanical challenge, So you stay away and plink away at their health bars from range. Both is boring. I don't think this is a bad game, but i also don't think its a good game. It's meh and for a bit i thought it would be a good podcast game, put on a podcast, hack enemies brainlessly. But its to meh even for that.
Its a bit annoying that the game cranks up the difficulty from 5 to 12 when you get to the checkpoint levels. The game overall HAS only 3 unit types,. Archers, Swordsmen and Pikes. Archers are far less useless then the other two. Archers miiight do damage but they also might miss and enemys keep moving to their target when not oppossed directly, which archers don't do because they are allergic to close combat. Its also not very usefull to have more then four units as long as your first four aren't fully upgraded. In the end you then use two groups of oikes and two groups of swordsmen with shields for support and protection against enemy archers. And even then, with such focus, the checkpoint levels will be a mess. I recommend activating the ability to repeat levels. Anything else would just make he frustration worse.
All my upgrades so far are from the first two levels who are probably better called the tutorial stage, because there is none after the first boss. So you aren't really getting rewarded for the first boss because the difficulty jumps up after it so at least at the beginning you have to deal with a slow dribble of 2 or 3 units of the upgrade currenzy for some time. The stingyness of the safe room (that secure your currenzy found till then is though the only problem so far. The combat feels impactfull, enemys are varied and interesting and even seem to support one another. Atmosphere and Optics are nice even beautyfull, if simple. Some features are not really bets thought trough (like weakening enemys I like it but loosing all that currenzy all the time is annoying.
I really want to say i love this game. I enjoyed it greatly upon release and for a bit after. Christmas and co had me busy so i couldn't realy tend to it. Coming back i discovered that i had a bug which would make the game default to a weird resolution of a centered one third of my screen. Setting the resolution back to 1080p was possible but whenever the game loadeed a level it went back to that resolution. Restarting and reinstalling didn't help and reporting the bug didn't get me any answer or help. If its playable one day again i will change this review but for now its wasted potential.
My main gripe for this review is the following: I dont have the newest XBox Controller but it works just perfect for every other game that i play with it on the PC. Since the controller is not the newest its Sticks are of course somewhat effected by this and tend to minimaly push into the one or other direction. That is normal and nothing to be ashamed off, it happens to all controler based control sticks with age. However, Everspace takes every miniscule input and reacts to it which leads to unasked drifting and careening and lowering the controler sensitivity in the settings doesn't do anything against that. There is also no simple way in the Controler setting to revert the use of the sticks so when i try to rebind them the game doesn't just take the input of one stick but both. Additionaly the tutorial is rather badly thought trough. If you are trying to introduce me to the game maybe deactivate the RNG until you are done. I got killed because the characters were talking and the screen was full of control advice while i was instantly attacked upon appearing in the current level. Not a good first impression.
