Everspace 2 Galactic Edition

Buy this if you want a loot-driven space dogfighter that respects your reflexes, and walk away if you came looking for a branching RPG where dialogue choices rewrite the ending, because mine never did. ROCKFISH wears the RPG label honestly in one direction (gear, perks, ship builds, numbers that climb) and barely at all in the other (agency, consequence, writing that reacts to you). Working out which of those two things you actually want is the entire purchase decision, and the Very Positive standing at 86 percent across nearly 13,000 reviews comes overwhelmingly from players who wanted the first one. I finished the campaign, went back for the post-credits content, and came away with a very specific recommendation. The flying is the reason to show up. Ships handle like arcade fighters rather than Newtonian simulators, so you boost, strafe, cut your engines to swing the nose around, dump a burst into a capital ship's exposed component, then peel off before the turrets zero in on you. Every ship class plays a different fantasy: the scout that snipes from a stupid distance, the gunship that parks inside a swarm and grinds it down, the close-range bruiser that wants to be in your face. Devices layer on top, teleporting you behind a target or stretching time out while your guns cool, and by hour 20 the build starts to feel like a flying style rather than a stat sheet. Enemy design pushes back too. Shield drones need popping first, armoured units want a different damage type than the one melting fighters, and snipers punish lazy positioning, so you swap weapons instead of settling on a favourite and coasting. Between fights you land on planets, break into derelict stations and solve small physics puzzles built around a tractor beam: haul a power sphere across a hangar, line up a reflector, shoot a fuse through a gap you had to make yourself. They are light brain teasers rather than proper puzzle boxes, but they change the rhythm, and the handcrafted locations are the game's quiet triumph. Nothing here is procedural sludge. Somebody placed every crate, cave mouth and hidden container, and once you learn to read a location for the bit that looks deliberately awkward to reach, poking around becomes its own loop. There is a real thrill in scanning an asteroid cluster and realising a whole side area was tucked behind it. Mining and crafting sit alongside all this, useful without demanding a spreadsheet, which I appreciated. The story is where I want to gently roast it. You play a clone carrying a borrowed identity, picking up a crew as you go, and the voice work is above genre average, especially the banter that fires mid-battle. The arcs land softly, though. Characters tend to state their damage rather than dramatise it, the antagonists are functional, and there is no reading of this campaign that reveals a second layer on a replay. Side jobs are the real weak link: fetch, clear, escort, produced in volume and openly there to keep your gear level in step with the next story gate. Anyone who has hit the wall where the mission wants level 14 and you are sitting at 11 knows exactly what the next two hours look like, and it is not character development. The endgame asks a different question again. Once the credits roll, the game leans on repeatable high-difficulty runs and legendary drops with rerollable modifiers, and whether that sustains you depends entirely on whether assembling an absurd damage stack is its own reward. Inventory management stays fiddly the whole way through, gear goes stale quickly thanks to level scaling, and the sheer volume of drops dulls the thrill of finding anything specific. Forty hours in, though, the flying still had not got old for me, which is more than I can say for most games built around loot. Come for the dogfights and the ship builds, stay for the exploration, and set your expectations for the writing at competent rather than memorable.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on Everspace 2 Galactic Edition.