Everspace (2017)

A cross between an arcade space sim and roguelike. Every time you die, you get to spend all your hard-earned cash on perks or new ships. And then start from the beginning.

Unlike some other space sims, you don’t need to manage your hull space much. What you do need to manage is your fuel for hyperspace jumps. And I got stuck on a few runs without it at first. You can still perform a jump, but it will damage your ship's internal systems, and repairing them is super expensive at first. So you die. Better get used to that.

One of the most impressive features is the ability to explore asteroids and ship derelicts from the inside. You don’t usually get that, but here it even works pretty well here, as the game gently aligns you for any situation.

The approach to quests is interesting. You meet a few characters, each with their own quest line, not just a single task. But the problem is, some of the rewards don’t persist between runs. Like the smuggler that asks you to bust an Outlaws base, and when you do, grants you a bunch of upgraded weapons. But I died shortly thereafter, losing all of that. It's still worth doing, though. The reward for this particular quest, for example, are allies that randomly come to your help.

I really respect space sims that get anything besides fighters/interceptors right. The Gunship is actually quite different from the Interceptor you start with, which is great. It has a turret. The turret is not always active; you need to activate it when enemies get close, but it is still very helpful, as are the drones you can emit. The downside is that you don’t have regenerative shields at all. So any damage you take, you need to repair yourself.

Later you can also get an impenetrable shield at the front, that can be activated once in a while. Combined with a turret and some drones, that makes the Gunship quite formidable.

Then I unlocked the Scout. At first, I couldn’t understand how such a flimsy craft could be effective. But the more appropriate name for it should be “sniper”. As it is equipped by default with a weapon with twice the range of most of the enemies. And it’s the only craft that has a stealth ability. So you can snipe, run away, and repeat.

The downside is the time. You’re being chased, so after a few minutes the enemy fleet usually teleports into the sector, forcing you to escape to the next one. So you don't always have the leisure to snipe everything you see, you see?

On the 16th attempt, I even managed to reach my destination, with the Scout, no less. The main struggle was with a frigate that blocked my path at one point. With it, you cannot jump out of the sector.

Luckily, I had an ARC-9000, which is Everspace’s version of a BFG.

But even with that, I just wasn’t doing enough damage. But I had lots of resources onboard. So in a very sci-fi manner, I started producing rockets to finish off the frigate.

Storywise, a human admiral planned to set up a false-flag operation, and the original Adam was forced into cooperation by being poisoned. He escaped, kicked off a clone production, and put himself into cryostasis, in hopes to switch bodies with one of the clones that would reach the lab. But even you as the clone that reached it is flawed. So now you need to collect DNA pieces to prolong your lifespan.

One detail that enormously impressed me is that when you destroy a frigate, it doesn’t simply evaporate. It turns into a hulk, that you need to navigate in order to get some of the loot trapped inside.

The approach this game has for perks is… interesting. There are stations you can find that hold perks. But in order to open the door to the station, you need an Access Key, that randomly drops from some enemies. And once you’ve got it, you also need to guess behind which of the two doors the perk is. The second door usually just holds a bunch of powerful weapons, but nothing persisting.

The game becomes more interesting as you acquire more blueprints. At first, the runs are mostly about luck. Then you start gaining the ability to craft Nano Injectors to preserve your Nano Bots and repair your ship when you need them most.

Once you collect all 8 DNA samples the corrupt admiral appears in a cruiser, which is impenetrable for your weapons, and you need to launch missiles from a silo at it.

The final boss really requires to bring every trick you’ve learned up your sleeve. The cruiser summons fighters with Corrosion Missiles, that penetrate shields and just a couple of those can finish most ships. So my bet was on Gunship, that doesn’t have shields anyway, and plenty of hull. Front shield also helps negate some of these. Still, you need a lot of repair items, and a lot of luck. Cruiser regenerates shields quickly, and the missile flies slowly, so a few times it hit the cruiser when its shields were already up again. And you need three pairs of eyes, to watch both the cruiser with its wave of flame attack at the fighters, and their missiles, all at the same time. It’s not a fun mission, I must say.

I also finally figured out what to do on the Ancient Temple map. Turns out you can fly inside the temple and summon the Ancient, or whatever that is. Luckily, on the run I discovered this I was running a Scout with “sniper rifles”, and Okkar can’t chase you there, so you have all the time in the world to chip at this fire blob and hide behind asteroids. It’s ironic that the perk that I’ve got from achieving this task is that those Ancient Depots are shown on the star map.

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Switched over to easy to finish the game. Just barely beat the end boss on second attempt with damaged shields and just a few hull points left at the very end (mainly because I got caught in the death ray before finding cover). Wasn't clear that turrets reboot and regenerate their energy cores, can bounce between two of them, also learned a missile or two late that the shields had to be down to do damage with a missile- and the missile launch is so slow it needs to be early in the recharge cycle when it launches.

The first attempt on the end boss I didn't know about the energy cores and took out most of the laser turrets on it, which was much more fun than launching missiles and hiding. More capital ship encounters (I did take on a frigate once) would have been nice.

Playing a few runs every day to upgrade steadily- as long as I don't hit a point of doing a run and not earning anything from it I'll keep going.

It's hard to aim at enemy ships with a gamepad (currently a xbox one, but maybe I should try my steam controller?), but weapons that auto aim and missile upgrades ought to improve that. I'd like to have a few levels that are more realistic, just mostly white stars on a deep black background instead of blue clouds everywhere, but maybe that would be too disorienting.

This is one of only a handful of games I own on multiple platforms - PC/Xbox and Switch, and part of an extremely select group of games I have completed more than once.

Stunning visuals, even on the Switch (though once you see it in 4K on Xbox One X, you'll have trouble playing other versions) and a highly addictive yet bite sized gameplay loop and a reasonable story (with great characters added in the expansion) I got really into this game for a couple of month long stretches over the last two years.

Main issue is that once I completed the main "quest" - get to and complete the last sector - I don't have much interest in gathering the items the game wants me to gather in order to truly "finish" this roguelike. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed my time with all versions of this game, and I'm a big backer of Everspace 2.