There’s very little “downtime” between bouts of combat and you can’t ignore the fighting altogether and survive by salvaging bits of old freighters, or make a living by running sardines from one space station to another. This is not a space sim in the traditional sense. The roguelikeness of this is emphasised from the start then. I’d earned an extra centimetre of padding in the soles of my shoes, when what I really wanted was some roller-wheels installed in the heel, or maybe those red lights that blink with every step.
Even during my most wealthy cashing-in periods I often came away feeling like I’d unlocked nothing particularly exciting or useful. But feels like more of a rip-off if you’re the type of player who likes to secure one or two skills at a time. This is good if you die and want to spread your credits all over the menu, slowly building up a better ship. One odd element of this menu is that each perk demands multiple injections of cash just to reach its next “level”, each injection more expensive than the last. Earn enough cash and you can unlock new types of ship – a light, stealth-ready fighter, or a heavy but shieldless gunship. On top of extra weapons slots or space for more consumables there are extra hull points, better credit drop rates, higher critical hit chance upgrades, fuel efficiency, and all different kinds of incremental stat boost. This is done via an inter-death tech tree of sorts.
#EVERSPACE 2 JOYSTICK UPGRADE#
That's because you are able to upgrade your spaceride between deaths, banking all the credits you clutched to your breast while exploding. And anyway that’s a poor metaphor, you never really “go bust” in this game because every death lets you cash in your chips.
It’s sometimes worth the risk, if the Okkar are already there and there’s no time to look for the nearest abandoned petrol station, why not press the “maybe you’ll die” button? I’ve gone bust a couple of times to this dice roll, but I don’t regret making the bet. If your tank is empty and you try to jump on fumes, you’ll be warned that it can severely damage your ship. At the end of every sector there’s a warp gate that takes you to an entirely new sector, and new starmap, with the difficulty hike that this entails.įuel is an important commodity in this respect, much more so than the ore, plasma, crystals and scrap that allows you to upgrade your weapons and craft new consumables or ammo. You’re greeted with an FTL style starmap, letting you choose which system to hop to next. Point your ship at the exit and warp away before they come and shred you to bits. Sooner or later a red blinking light and buzzer will warn you of imminent super-powerful Okkar ships, coming to have a go because they think they're hard enough (they are). After warping into each new area you only have a limited time to blow folks up, loot their corpses, explore a little, rummage through derelicts, and slurp up any plasma, gas, credits or fuel lying around. Or a “time extender” that will slow everything down for 20 seconds or so and make any dialogue audio gooo realllyyyy sloooooow iiin the moooost comicaaaaal waaaaaay.īut the Okkar, not the story of them, are what drive you on. Primary weapons? Let’s see, pulse lasers, gatling guns, fusion cannons, beam lasers, flak cannons… okay, check! Secondary weapons? Light missile, heavy missiles, shield breaker missiles, another bigger, explodier missile… check! There are also different modules and consumables that come in handy, like drones that will fight for you or recharge your shield. The story, delivered with voiceovers and moving sketches that appear between sectors, doesn’t matter much. A computer voice is there to help you and periodically fills you in on the half-hearted politics of the universe (some reptile aliens called the Okkar did a war with humanity, then the war ended but they still don’t like each other). You’re a clone with amnesia because this is a videogame and you have to jump from sector to sector to earn flashbacks of your origins.
Nevertheless, it’s a better-than-average dogfighting sim - uppercase “DOGFIGHTING”, lowercase “sim”.
I’d call all the boosting and lasering and missile-launching a “ballet” but that would imply some finesse on the part of the pilot, whereas I have none. It’s an arcadey, gun-swapping dance of asteroids and explosions. But it's properly out now, so I’m going to tell you wot I think. Zoom! It’s a roguelike that our Alec took a peep at once before. But last month it turned up the warp crank and charged the star batteries to "quite full". Sci-fi dogfighter Everspace has been stuck in the early access nebula since September last year.
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