Everspace 2 Review (Raif Redacted)
I've sank 150 hours into this release and just got to the current story end. No, it won't take that long just to complete the story and side quests. You'll find in this game that time is mostly used trying to solve each maps' puzzles. It's a good game, but some flaws do exist (especially with inertia dampeners off) and many of them are from puzzle complications.
Elite Dangerous FA-off pilots: you can play this.
Positives:
Story really is the driving force of gameplay, meaning you don't actually have to grind out levels or 100% the maps to get through the game. You can choose to stick to the story and some side quests for whatever you need. Obviously, going this route means you won't get every perk, you likely won't find enough upgrades to roll enemies, and you definitely won't be able to try out the current end-game rifts.
Flying and combat both feel pretty good. If you keep inertia dampeners on, whether you use 1st or 3rd-person camera, you won't notice most of the issues. Targeting can be forgiving and the settings are nicely adjustable. Enemies are not going to be pushovers, either; NPCs are pretty intelligent. Everything feels smooth and engaging.
Weapon options are actually pretty good. My favorite weapons have been: Union High-Velocity Flak for AOE, Union High-Velocity Blaster or Maverick Powerful Coil Gun for serious damage, Mining-enhanced Beam Laser for mining, and Swift Rail Gun for range. After trying all the secondary weapons, the only options that seemed useful enough to never drop were Homing Missiles, Destabilizer Missiles, and Cruise Torpedoes. Look for these with 'Cannot be damaged' and "Cannot be intercepted' passives.
Ships at this point go up to tier 3+ (likely higher later on) and around the end of the game can be much easier to find the variation you want (passives can be swapped from one generated list to a second before buying and the full ship list can be regenerated once every 10 minutes). I've only bothered using 3 types because of what they provide. You start with a Sentinel and I'd recommend sticking to that for a bit, then looking into an Interceptor for more primary and secondary slots (I also like the unique passive and list of other passives far more) or the Gunship (probably the best unique passive, doubling your primary weapon hardpoints).
Ship perks and devices are also nicely varied. I won't list my favorite perks (the player perks have you choose 1 of 3 options every 5 levels, but the crew perks you can just unlock all of them), but I generally stuck with 2 warfare and 2 support devices. The EMP and Viral warfare devices, then one heal and one escape device, depending on situation.
The puzzles can be interesting. The removal of dynamic leveling in most areas and situations (one of the patches did this) makes clearing a map feel generally fine. You may feel a bit frustrated by the consistent enemy waves, but they're always 3k+ km out and don't just immediately make a beeline to you. The game has easier puzzles at the start to give you an idea of what to expect later on. One of the more frustrating puzzles (timed asteroid explosives) generally falls off the further you go.
Negatives:
Story plot armor is a bit annoying, but understandable in most situations. I think the biggest annoyance came during a follow/chase mission. You have to stay within a specific distance of someone and it felt incredibly bad to fail this just because you lost sight of which tunnel the person went down. It was much worse for me, though, since the physics can be a large hindrance (more about that below).
The sensitivity of keyboard and mouse is too high, and this is so much worse with inertia dampeners off. While the mouse part is adjustable, the keyboard keys need to lose about 30% sensitivity. The physics are also incredibly bouncy, meaning if you hit something with any part of your ship, no matter how lightly, the game responds by throwing your camera very roughly. With how unforgiving these two issues can be, ships with the highest handling can actually feel worse than the lower handling ships. If you use K&M and are also bothered by the sensitivity, try lower handling ships until it feels better.
The headlights are just horrendous. Seriously. This is mostly a problem in 1st-person with the ship cockpit showing. They treat it like a flashlight being held rather than a spaceship with headlights and multiple lighting devices meant to help stop you from dying in the darkness of space. I'm sure they thought this was atmospheric or something, but it doesn't have enough practical use this way. It also defaults as turned on rather than off. A very odd choice, but since it's so terrible, you can hardly notice it. It only adds to the frustration of the tunnel areas when you hope to brighten things up by pushing the headlights button, only to remember they're already on...
Another 1st-person specific issue is when carrying an item, there's no transparency to it. So with or without cockpit showing, you have most of the middle of your screen completely blocked, and even with cockpit off, something like a protector orb has animation to it that smothers your view almost entirely. I've ran into so many walls in the tunnel areas because of this and you're usually on a timer. Incredibly annoying.
Some puzzles are just too complicated. Not because "my brain doesn't understand" complicated, but because adding more red buttons to randomly shoot in a specific order is dumb. Some of these have details that show you which to shoot and when. Those are fine and actually cool when you notice what the giveaway is, but they're too few, given how many puzzles exist. Asteroid explosives (mentioned above) will sometimes feel like you have only JUST enough time (one in particular had a very large asteroid and 5 explosives to set with basically a one-second buffer for each, based on my pretty adept flying).
I think the worst part of the game is map clearing. It's one thing to have 3 or 4 puzzles and maybe 1 or 2 hidden caches per map. It's quite another to have 22 hidden caches, 2 invisible caches, and some shadow monsters or whatever on a map that has loads of verticality, tunnels, and dark spaces. Yes, you should give people the option to spend time on maps, but just take a look at my hours played and know that I only found around 70% or so of every hidden thing.
The other major issue for me, as an inertia dampeners off pilot, is that the puzzles are ABSOLUTELY built with dampeners on in mind and ONLY with them on. One specific point in the main story requires you to hack into a drone and pilot that instead of your ship through some wind tunnels. It is, and I'm not exaggerating, impossible to complete without dampeners. I didn't even realize that was the problem until about try number 30. There are puzzles that force your ship through these same sorts of wind tunnels, as well. Again, with dampeners, you just hold reverse throttle or forward throttle and you'll be generally fine with control. Without dampeners? There's no control at all. Throttle control is essentially turned off. It just flings your ship and you have to hope you don't explode on impact with the wall that you WILL hit.
Current end-game rifts are timed and super annoying. I didn't even bother after a few attempts, since legendary equipment is useless given the current state of the game. Full Superior with or without Prototype/Starforged will give you all the punch and survival you need.
Conclusion:
Good game with solid gameplay mechanics, adjustable settings, and a decent enough story, but serious issues for dampeners off pilots, some 1st-person issues, a terrible flashlight meant for Resident Evil players, and map clears that become too complicated for their own good. The negatives can be fixed (if they read this review), but I think most players will accept what exists and enjoy the game a lot. Just don't get burned out trying to 100% every map. It really is incredibly tedious.