EVERSPACE™ 2
Last updated: 2025-08-15
- Stunning visuals and polished gameplay
- Engaging space combat and dogfights
- Deep RPG and customization systems
- Repetitive and unengaging story/puzzles
- Unrewarding progression and loot
- Poor controls and motion sickness
Emotions
Players felt satisfied by the game's overall high quality, including its engaging gameplay loop, impressive visuals, and extensive content. The game's ability to fulfill a desire for a 'Freelancer-like' experience, coupled with robust customization and progression systems, significantly contributed to this positive emotion. Developer support and continuous improvements also enhanced player satisfaction.
Frustration primarily stemmed from poorly designed and excessive puzzles, which many players found tedious and out of place in a space shooter. Other significant causes included repetitive travel, grindy progression, and technical issues like game crashes and performance drops. Difficult or unfair enemy scaling and unclear mechanics also contributed to player annoyance.
Disappointment arose from the game not meeting expectations, often due to a perceived lack of depth, repetitive content, or a weak story. Players were also let down by the prevalence of puzzles, which detracted from the expected combat focus, and issues like poor optimization or unrewarding endgame activities. Comparisons to other games, especially its predecessor or 'Freelancer', often highlighted these shortcomings.
Excitement was generated by the game's high-quality, action-packed combat and engaging exploration. Players were thrilled by the addictive gameplay loop, stunning visuals, and the promise of future content and improvements. The game's ability to deliver a thrilling space adventure, often compared favorably to classic titles, also fueled this emotion.
Players experienced enjoyment from the game's core gameplay, including satisfying space combat, engaging exploration, and a compelling story. The game's visuals, audio, and ship customization options further enhanced this enjoyment. Overcoming early challenges and the overall fun factor of flying and fighting in space were also key contributors.
Verdict
Mixed
Summary
Positive 71% · Negative 29%. Score: 29 / 100
Positives:
- Players consistently praise the game's stunning visuals, high-quality graphics, and impressive art direction, noting significant improvements over its predecessor. The overall gameplay experience is described as captivating, fun, and highly polished, offering substantial content and replayability.
- The game excels in its space combat, offering engaging dogfights that are fast-paced, fluid, and satisfying. Players enjoy the arcade-style action, diverse weapon options, and the feeling of power from ship upgrades, often comparing it favorably to classic space shooters like Freelancer and Galaxy on Fire.
- The game offers robust RPG elements, including a satisfying loot and progression system, extensive ship customization, and a wide variety of weapons and equipment. Players enjoy experimenting with different builds and playstyles, finding the upgrade loop addictive and rewarding.
- Players find the game highly addictive and enjoyable, often losing track of time while playing. Its accessible nature, easy-to-learn controls, and balanced difficulty make it suitable for both casual and dedicated players. The game also incorporates humor and a relaxed atmosphere, contributing to a pleasant overall experience.
- Many players consider the game a true spiritual successor to beloved classic space games like Freelancer and Privateer. It successfully captures the nostalgic feel and core gameplay loop of these titles while modernizing the experience.
Negatives:
- Player feedback consistently highlights that the story is unengaging, generic, and often feels like filler. The narrative is linear with no player choices, and characters are perceived as bland. A significant portion of the game's content, including main and side quests, is dedicated to repetitive and unrewarding puzzles, which players feel are forced and detract from the core gameplay experience. This design choice is seen as an artificial way to extend game length rather than providing meaningful content.
- The game's progression and loot systems are heavily criticized for being tedious and unrewarding. Enemy scaling with player level makes upgrades feel pointless, as players are constantly grinding just to keep pace. The lack of meaningful ship and weapon variety, coupled with a cumbersome upgrade system, further contributes to a sense of stagnation and a lack of satisfying progression.
- Many players report significant issues with controls, particularly for mouse and keyboard, describing them as clunky, wobbly, and poorly implemented. This often leads to frustration and difficulty with precise aiming and movement. Additionally, the game's 3D navigation and camera movements frequently cause motion sickness and dizziness for a notable portion of the player base, making extended play sessions uncomfortable or impossible.
- The crafting system is widely considered useless and poorly designed. Players find it overly complicated, requiring too many resources, and often yielding items inferior to those found through drops. This makes crafting feel like a waste of time and effort, lacking any real benefit or excitement.
- Frequent and lengthy loading screens between locations and during FTL jumps severely break immersion and make travel a tedious chore. The large, often empty maps, combined with a lack of effective fast travel, result in excessive and boring travel times, further contributing to a sense of monotony.
Gameplay:
- The game is primarily a space looter-shooter with strong Action RPG (ARPG) elements, often compared to Diablo in space. It features an open world with exploration, puzzles, and a significant shift from the roguelike mechanics of its predecessor, Everspace 1, to a more persistent RPG experience.
- Players control various spaceship types, each with unique abilities, playstyles, and customization options. The game features an arcade-style flight model with 6-axis movement, focusing on dogfighting rather than realistic simulation. Ships can be extensively upgraded and visually customized, with different rarities and tiers affecting attributes and combat roles.
- The game offers a substantial main story (around 40-50 hours) complemented by numerous side quests, random events, and procedurally generated jobs, providing hundreds of hours of content. While some players find the gameplay loop repetitive, the difficulty scales with player progression, and grinding is present but often optional.
- The game features a deep equipment system with various weapons, shields, and components, all with rarity tiers, levels, and modifiers. Players can upgrade items, collect set bonuses, and utilize a perk/talent system for character and companion progression, allowing for diverse builds and playstyle customization.
- Puzzles are a core and frequent element of the gameplay, often integrated into exploration and missions. These environmental puzzles involve manipulating objects, finding power sources, and navigating tight spaces, often rewarding players with valuable loot.
Performance:
- Many players report excellent overall performance, with the game running smoothly on a wide range of hardware, including mid-range PCs, Steam Deck, and Mac. Frame rates are generally stable, and the game is well-optimized for various configurations.
- Despite generally good performance, several players noted significant FPS drops and lag in specific areas, especially on planets, during large battles, or in locations with many ambient details. This suggests some optimization challenges, potentially linked to the Unreal Engine.
- Some players experienced frequent crashes, particularly after a recent update or during specific game events like loading post-mission videos or respawning. Troubleshooting steps often did not resolve these issues, though one user noted an outdated BIOS as a cause.
- Player feedback on loading times is mixed; some report minimal and fast loading screens, while others find them frequent and potentially indicative of optimization issues.
- Players with high-end GPUs like the RTX 3070 and GTX 1070 report varying performance at max settings, with some unable to achieve stable high frame rates, while others run the game flawlessly.
Recommendations:
- Many players highly recommend the game, praising it as a solid, enjoyable, and worthwhile purchase. They express strong satisfaction and consider it a great addition to their game library, often giving it high ratings.
- The game is strongly recommended for fans of space combat, looter-shooters, and especially those who enjoyed classic titles like Freelancer or Galaxy on Fire. Players appreciate its arcade-style dogfights, exploration, and RPG elements.
- While generally recommended, many players suggest purchasing the game during a sale due to concerns about its full price. They feel it offers excellent value at a discount, but some find the base price too high for the content provided.
- Players are eager for more content, specifically expressing strong interest in future DLCs and a potential third installment of the game. They hope for continued development and expansion of the game's universe.
- There's a notable desire among players for multiplayer or co-op modes, with some believing such features would significantly enhance the game's appeal and longevity. This is a common request for future iterations.
Miscellaneous:
- Players report significant playtime, ranging from 30 to over 150 hours, for completing the main story, side content, and achieving 100% completion. Many feel the game offers good value for its price, especially considering ongoing developer support and content updates.
- Players express strong interest in future content, including more DLCs, story expansions, and a potential Everspace 3. There's also a desire for new features like multiplayer/co-op modes, more RPG elements, and a rogue-lite mode, indicating a wish for continued development and expansion of the game's universe.
- The game is frequently compared to classic space combat and exploration titles like Freelancer, Wing Commander: Privateer, and Galaxy on Fire. Players often seek a modern successor to these games, and Everspace 2 largely fulfills that desire, though some note it doesn't fully match the depth of more complex sims like Elite Dangerous or No Man's Sky.
- Some players encountered minor bugs or crashes, but these generally did not hinder gameplay. There's a sentiment that the game, particularly in early access, still has untapped potential and will improve further with future patches and its final release, though a few found it mediocre or unfinished.
- The game is considered suitable for a broad audience, including teens and adults, and is described as generally accessible and not overly stressful, making it a 'kidney-protecting' experience.
