A rather inoffensive rogue-lite space shooter. Not much content unless you buy the Encounters DLC. It's got a simple premise to go with the simplistic gameplay: you control a clone of some other dude who's slowly remembering who he used to be and what happened to the original. Cutscenes are of the lazy variety, meaning, very blurry concept art stills with cheap effects and terrible static shots of your spacecraft as voiceover clips play. The gameplay itself is, as I said, nothing to write home about: you travel through a total of 7 sectors, each containing a number of stages where you do dogfighting battles and collect various trinkets and resources. As per usual, when you die, you start from sector 1, but keep both credits and certain special items collected. Your vessel of choice (one of four counting DLC) has a number of permanent upgrades you obtain by spending money accrued during the last run, and range from increasing speed, armor and gathered resources to other less vital stats, like knowing more about the zone you are visiting or getting better deals with merchants. Then there're perks that increase stats by a tiny ammount, but also usually sport some type of drawback. There's really not much else to it. You go out, shoot some ace space lizards or some bandits, and ocassionally you'll take out a massive starship, often by laming it out with corrosion missiles and very long distance charge lasers, or with an emergency nuke-type secondary weapon. Your time on each zone is limited, as an alien race is constantly looking for you, so you have something like 10 minutes of free play before you get invaded by the Okkar forces and are forced to leave unless you are very, very skilled and got powerful enough weaponry to destroy the increasingly difficult waves of enemies, which start very strong and only get worse. Some zones have a "sensors impaired" mechanic which lets you roam freely for as long as you want though. As for the DLC, it gives you an extra ship and a few side quests. You'll be taking on the role of bounty hunter, engineer, outlaw, biologist, and a few other jobs. It's not entirely rivetting work, but it is a neat distraction from the otherwise barren environments that consist mostly of scrap and asteroid fields.
The game controls fine, though expect it to be scientifically inaccurate (for example, you quickly come to a halt when you stop boosting), which I guess is to make the game more fun and less annoying to play, though that can make or break it for some. Dogfights are fun, generally short romps that break the monotony of finding minerals, gas and tech floating about the debris, but they can also take a long time when you are facing higher tiered flyers and battleships. Those can be quite intimidating and could appear very early on, forcing you to use your consumables and tertiary systems (such as increasing damage and rate of fire or disabling drones at range) and wimp it out to take cover behind asteroids as your shields replenish. Thankfully you can use neutral NPCs in the vicinity as meat shields, drawing enemy fire to them and then seeing them do battle for you, usually wiping the enemies out and letting you seize the booty. I don't know why the yellow units don't collect their drops, since there's no EXP or any such system in the game, so clearly the best strat is draw enemy fire to neutral factions and Encounters NPCs to let them do battle for you, though they aren't always present. There's also a few anomalies that you deal with, though they are rare and even optional.
That is pretty much Everspace. I've heard people praise its visuals, but they are wholly generic and bland to to me. The music is absolutely terrible, to the point I turned it off, and the sound effects are pitiful "pew pew pew" noises which don't exactly give the combat a lot of impact. The performance is also iffy at best. At some points I saw the game skip multiple frames of animation amidst the slowdown during intense battles, but not the next time. Plus, there's no online multiplayer or anything like say, "summoning" another player (I know, I know!) to help you out, so it's a very lonely, somewhat boring experience to be frank. Which is why I stopped playing. The game's environments are so repetitive and the difficulty ramps up so often that it defeats the purpose of seeing the same vapid sights over and over again, even though they are supposed to be randomly generated each time. I was consistently making progress up to zone 7, but when I died late in zone 6, I couldn't be bothered anymore, since there was nothing to see or do that was stimulating anymore. Not like destroying an Okkar Corvette for the first time. It became a matter of simply upgrading my credits collection stat and getting as much money as possible before the inevitable happened, though nothing fun was going on between runs.
Who knows, you might get a kick out of it if you are a Freelancer whorshipper. It's a cheap, cheaply made inoffensive game, sometimes fun, but it's unlikely it will hold your attention for more than a few hours total since there's no depth to it.
