Everspace is an alright rogue-like arcadey space combat game, but offers very little in terms of a compelling story, ship management, or variety. It's essentially an action-based dumbed-down FTL.
Like in FTL, you're going from sector to sector where you gather materials, fight, or participate in events. Most locations have a time limit, where if you don't jump out, you'll be attacked byEverspace is an alright rogue-like arcadey space combat game, but offers very little in terms of a compelling story, ship management, or variety. It's essentially an action-based dumbed-down FTL.
Like in FTL, you're going from sector to sector where you gather materials, fight, or participate in events. Most locations have a time limit, where if you don't jump out, you'll be attacked by the enemy fleet. Unlike FTL, there's no good reason why or how this fleet is tracking you, so it seems to be put in just to imitate FTL, or to possibly cover up how empty some of the locations are.
The story is serviceable and provides a basic excuse to go though the same sectors over and to continue retrying after you've died. Your primary goal is to get to sector 7. The story expands from there, and you get a cut scene for each new sector you reach.
The game is based around getting as far as you can, dying, and spending the money you earned on new ships (only 4 ships) and passive upgrades. After 10-15 runs for upgrades, I eventually got to sector 7, where I got a story reason to repeat going to sector 7 over and over. This would be okay if there was more variety in the game.
Combat is good overall, but is lacking enemy variety and their AI is easily exploitable. Enemies can't anticipate you moving in curves or circles, so you can avoid 99% of all damage if you just move in circles during combat. So if you want to take on an overpowered battleship with a weak weapon, it's no problem: Just shoot at it for 10 minutes while you move in circles.
The only difficulty I had in combat was enemies coming at me from multiple directions. I normally resolved this by boosting out to get all enemies on one side of me. Boosting is a pain because it requires holding down either R3 or L3 (can't be changed). Holding either of those buttons is hard on your carpel tunnel, so if you've got issues there, you'll need to take breaks often. Also, boosting is the best way to get to the various resources in a section, so you'll be using it a lot out-of-battle.
Ship upgrades between runs aren't very interesting. They consist of things like more hit points, increased energy (needed for weapons), and more money gained. You'll eventually upgrade them all. There's 20 or so primary weapons in the game, but only a few are worth using. You'll find one that works well in most situations and likely use it throughout the run. Secondary weapons are primarily missiles. There's only a few good ones here too, and they're typically only useful when surrounded.
There's drones in the game, though they're hard to find/create and they don't last long since enemies always attack them first. I primarily used them as decoys.
As for other things to do, there's upgrade shops, traders, raw materials, locked chests, and events. Raw material gathering isn't very fun. You basically find a rock, shoot at it, and materials pop out. Use materials to trade for other materials (at traders), or to upgrade/create weapons. For locked chests and doors, you must find a key dropped by an elite enemy. Finding one is much harder than killing them, but when you do, you get a one-time key for opening locked things, which yield better-than average weapons and items.
There's a variety of rare bonuses and blueprints (for weapon/item creation), but it will take a lot of grinding to find them all, and they aren't necessary to beat the game. There's other items you can find and use, but they're not interesting enough to mention here.
The events in the game are interesting, but they're available only as DLC or with the complete edition. They consist of about 5 different people who you can find randomly. You do quests for them, such as scanning life forms, killing outlaws, or collecting items. If you complete all of a person's events, you normally get something useful, such as having that person randomly jump in to help you fight.
All of the above might seem like a lot, but it got old for me quick. My gameplay sessions consisted of going to a sector, killing all enemies, collecting as much materials as I could, and then jumping out when the enemy fleet was about to jump in. Repeat that about 25 times to get to the end (if you survive). And if I was lucky, I'd get an event or a battleship to fight (for 10 minutes in circles) to break up the monotony. Well, at least looking at the pretty planets and ring systems was okay..
After nearly fully upgrading one ship, getting to sector 7 and seeing that the game wants me to do the same thing over and over to unlock the last bit of story content, I've decided that it's not worth irritating my carpel tunnel even more and will move on to the next game.… Expand
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