Everspace 2 Review: Freelancer Sequel In All But Name

Freelancer, Alpha One Dash One, you are cleared for launch. Good luck out there! These words, after departing from any base, planet, or outpost, live in my brain rent-free, from Digital Anvil’s beloved space sim, Freelancer, the best example of an arcade space simulator, that’s yearned for a sequel after almost 20 years.

And while Everspace 2 doesn’t carry the Freelancer name and isn’t associated with its creator Chris Roberts, it’s clear that German studio Rockfish Games have used the two-decade-old game as the foundation for an exhilarating, accessible, story-driven, space-looter-shooter, that forges its own identity, in 2023.

Mouse-driven space combat makes its triumphant return

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Elite Dangerous, Star Citizen, and other ‘realistic’ space simulators. I ponied up during the first Covid lockdown for an X52 pro flight stick and enjoyed all 350ish hours I spent mining Low-Temperature Diamonds and Thargoid hunting in my Type-10 Defender. 

But what’s nice about Everspace 2 is that you simply don’t have to faff around with a flight stick. I mean, sure, they’re supported, but like Freelancer, it’s best to play with mouse and keyboard in the third person.

Ship handling in Everspace 2 is designed with an arcadey feel, allowing for full 3D movement and precise vertical thrust for squeezing through Death Star-styled tight spaces. Ships feel nimble, precise, and feel exactly how the rebellion would want their ships to feel if they were off on a covert bombing run.

And actually shooting ships themselves is much improved over Freelancer’s endless enemy chasing. Instead, Rockfish have given players a lock-on system, a leading fire indicator, and a little bit of aim assist to make it easier for you to dispense with targets with ease

But while on paper, this all sounds quite generous, Everspace 2 combat is very much about juggling your shields, armour, and hull. You’ll have to deal with large volumes of enemies, weaving your way around asteroids and ships, juggling batteries to boost your shields, or infusing hull plating to boost armour quickly.

Additional challenge comes from a broad array of enemy types, including the standard grunts, to elite units and bosses. All pose different challenges, including shield types, heavier hull plating, and general manoevurability. 

There’s an option to go with a first-person view, but I honestly wouldn’t bother. It feels cumbersome to fly ships, compared to piloting in third-person. Clearly, developer Rockfish intends for players to play in the third-person (and to be honest, they sorta admitted this throughout the early access period)

Marrying Classic Gameplay with Modern Gameplay Mechanics

Besides my nostalgic glee at playing something that’s basically Freelancer 2, Everspace 2 brings its own ideas to the table. Rockfish Games have spent their two-year early access period taking notes from loot-driven games like Borderlands, Destiny, and Diablo.

Every enemy you kill, every supply box you open, the cluster of glowing things on the side of an asteroid, or perhaps the remnants of a gunship are all packed with loot. This could be some resources for the crafting system in the game, or it could be a new cannon, missile system, or torpedo launcher. 

Like other looter games, there are tiers of rarity, starting with common and working their way up to rare. Each tier imbues your item with additional stats, like extra damage, or even elemental damage.

What’s great about this is that you never know what’s around the corner. Blasting a pirate into smithereens might reward you with a sick new gauss gun to slap onto your ship; but then again, it might not. 

And that’s how Everspace 2 gets you: it’s always tantalisingly teasing that carrot in front of your nose, encouraging you to keep on raiding outlaw outposts, mining rocks, and delivering commodities.

Almost every activity in the game rewards you with credits. And you can spend these at outposts dotted across the sprawling galaxy Rockfish has created. 

There’s quite the selection of ships, all with their strengths and weaknesses. Some are slower, but have access to a wider array of mounting points for your weapons. Others are more manoeuvrable, at the cost of armaments. 

One thing to note, though – they aren’t cheap. In the early game, you’ll have to stuff cash in your space piggy bank for quite some time to earn another ship.

All ships are upgradeable in loads of different ways. The majority of new toys come in gun form. Things like a rail guns, torpedo launchers, and status-inflicting weapons, such as corrosion, or shield-draining lasers.

The crown jewel of your ship upgrades is the Destiny 2-styled ‘super’ system. Once charged, you can mash a button, and your ship activates its ultimate ability. 

In the early game, it’s this 20-30 second force lightning-styled super, which unleashes bolts of unlimited power on your opponents. It’s truly devastating, melts shields and hulls, and so it’s right that there’s a chunky cooldown on it. I shan’t spoil the surprise of other supers, as there are a fair few of them, but they’re pretty spicy.

Underpinning all of this is a modern XP gathering system. Literally, everything in the game grants you XP. Experience points help you get access to purchase better quality gear at vendors, better ships, and better crafting recipes for your space adventures.

Ditches Rogue-like Formula for Better Story-Driven Experience

If you were concerned about whether you need to play the first Everspace to enjoy this incarnation of the franchise, you need not be worried. I didn’t play the first one myself, and while there are one or two callbacks to the original peppered throughout the game, Everspace 2 can be enjoyed in isolation.

For starters, Rockfish Games ditched the rogue-like features of the original, for a more conventional story-driven experience. On balance, despite the popularity of rogue-like games, Everspace 2 is the better for it. You get a more coherent story, told consistently from the point of view of playable character Adam Roslin, who’s himself a clone of one of the playable pilot characters from the first game.

Things are tough for Adam when you’re first starting out. He’s been forced to hide his identity, as the galactic overlords running the ‘verse have decided clones are a bad thing. 

And so, you spend the opening parts of the game operating incognito for a mining company under a pseudonym, trying to eke out enough credits to earn a way out of the war-ravaged DMZ, a wasteland from a war against some aliens.

Slowly, you get drawn into a wider conflict as your fake identity begins to unravel. I won’t spoil specific details, but what I will say is that I did the 30 hours or so of what Everspace 2 had to offer.

In what must’ve been a cost-cutting exercise, Rockfish Games decided to dole out key story beats in a hand-drawn style, similar to what Until Dusk Falls and Disco Elysium offer. I think, for the most part, this was a shrewd decision. For starters, I quite liked the artistic style in those games in the initial instance, but in the case of Everspace 2, it prevents unnecessary spend on animating complex cutscenes with janky lip sync issues. 

Despite a Throwback Feel, Is It Enough in 2023?

In a world where Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous exist, is there a space for Everspace 2? Both of the former titles are limitless, multiplayer, open worlds, with discovery and intrigue around every corner. But with Everspace 2, it masquerades as this enormous open-world title. But the reality is, the more you play it, the more that parts of it start to feel samey after a while.

For instance, I picked up several contracts to neutralise several pilots. It yielded a series of random coordinates, and it resulted in pretty much identical base destruction missions, with a boss enemy thrown in for good measure in the end.

But it was the flying around space that started to break the immersion for me. Playing Elite Dangerous, despite its enormous, procedurally generated universe, playing with my friends and other players in the open world made the game feel truly alive. Instead, with no online component, think of Everspace 2’s open world as a series of rooms off one long corridor. 

Each system is a small zone, which you zip in and out of using your ship’s FTL drive. Sunlight cruising gets you from one part of the zone to the other. Usually, after about five or ten minutes, you’re back in FTL, going to your next system to progress a quest or fulfill a contract. 

One upshot of this is that each system has been designed lovingly by the developers. Some of the locations are even planetside, with some offering a descent into some caves to blast away some baddies. Some are asteroid fields, peppered with the desiccated husks of military vessels, hollowed out by battle.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether the game would’ve benefitted from a dialogue selection wheel, like Mass Effect. After all, this is a single-player experience, and choosing dialogue affords that additional level of immersion and exploration of lore. Sadly, this isn’t an option, and additional details surrounding the universe Rockfish Games has created are relegated to lore entries in a menu.

Treat Everspace 2 For What It Is: A Throwback Single-Player Game

Everspace 2 scratches that glowing itch inside your brain that demands a casual space simulator experience. It’s a love letter to a simpler time in video games, a time when player engagement statistics weren’t a thing and there wasn’t an endless cadence of updates, microtransactions, and downloadable content.

Instead, Everspace 2 is a 30-hour romp through a serviceable, but not stellar, story. Indeed, the star of the show is the arcade-like flight controls, accessible combat, and endless degree of customisation options for your ship.

If you accept Everspace 2 for what it is and recalibrate your expectations, you’ll have a great time.

Final Verdict: 4/5

Available On: PC (reviewed) Publisher: Rockfish Games; Developer: Rockfish Games; Released: 6 April, 2023; Players: 1; ESRB: M for Mature 17+; MSRP: $49.99

Full Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.