Everspace 2

There’s a specific hole in the PC gaming landscape that has been open since Microsoft shuttered Digital Anvil. Not the simulation hole — Elite Dangerous and X4 have that territory locked down, with their docking procedures and supply chains and 40-minute supercruise transits. The other hole. The one where you point a nose at a bandit, mash boost, and pull a drift turn through an asteroid because it feels good. Freelancer-shaped. Nobody had properly filled it.

EVERSPACE 2 fills it, and then does something slightly unhinged: it staples a Diablo loot economy to the fuselage.

ROCKFISH Games is a small Hamburg outfit, which matters to understanding what this game is and isn’t. The first Everspace, in 2017, was a roguelike — tight, punishing, structurally cheap to build, and a hit largely because the flight model punched above the studio’s weight. The sequel throws that structure in the bin. Released April 6, 2023 after more than two years in Early Access, it’s a story-driven open-world campaign: you’re Adam Roslin, a clone pilot with a complicated relationship to his own mortality, dragged into a factional mess across the Demilitarized Zone. The critical path runs around 30 hours, with far more for completionists.

Its market position is unusual and, frankly, smart. It doesn’t compete with Elite on fidelity — it can’t, and doesn’t try. It competes on feel and on reward density. Where a sim asks for your patience, Everspace 2 asks for your reflexes and pays out roughly every 90 seconds. The reception has been broadly positive, and the reservations that temper it are the story of this review — the shine, and the specific places it wears thin.

• Arcade flight model with weight: Boost, drift, and evasive maneuvers on a twitch-response layer. No Newtonian drift sim, no flight-assist toggle worship. It’s closer to a hero shooter’s movement kit than to a cockpit sim, and it’s the best-tuned thing in the game.
• Nine ship classes across three tiers: Light interceptors through heavy gunships, each with a unique ultimate ability that reshapes how you fight rather than just adding damage. The Vindicator’s drone swarm and the Bomber’s payload dump aren’t cosmetic variants — they’re different games.
• Tiered loot with genuine theorycrafting depth: Rarity-graded weapons, modules, and perks that interact. Build-crafting here has real ceilings, not the illusion of choice you get from most action-RPG-lite systems.
• Handcrafted star systems: No procedural generation. Every derelict, cache, environmental puzzle, and mining node was placed by a human, and it shows in the density.
• Endgame architecture: High-risk areas, rifts, and legendary hunts, extended by the Titans and Wrath of the Ancients DLC — actual post-campaign structure rather than a difficulty slider and a shrug.

The Flight Model Is the Whole Argument

Start here, because everything else is downstream of it. Everspace 2’s ship handling is tactile in a way very few games in this genre manage. There’s a satisfying mass differential between a light interceptor and a heavy — the interceptor snaps, the heavy leans. Boost has a real cost curve. The drift mechanic, which decouples your thrust vector from your facing, turns dogfights into a kind of three-dimensional skateboarding: you’re constantly trading momentum for firing angle.

Crucially, the enemies were designed for this. Outlaw fighters juke. Capital ships have subsystem weak points that force you to fly around them rather than at them. Ancient guardians rewrite the encounter grammar entirely with shield phases that punish the mash-boost-and-strafe habit the first ten hours train into you. When the game is firing on all cylinders — a three-way fight in a debris field, shields down, ultimate charging — it’s built to produce a flow state that Star Wars: Squadrons and Chorus both reached for and missed.

The Loot Loop, and Where It Frays

The Diablo grafting is more successful than it has any right to be. Gear drops constantly, rarities escalate, and by the mid-game you’re running builds — not “I picked the big gun” builds, but real ones, where a corrosion-stacking secondary feeds a perk that feeds an ultimate cooldown reduction. The crafting and module systems have enough surface area that the community has produced genuine meta discourse. For a studio this size, that’s a serious achievement in systems design.

The fray is in the presentation, not the math. Inventory management is fiddly and under-designed — too many clicks, too much scrolling, comparison tooltips that require more cognitive load than they should. The menus ask for real minutes of spreadsheet work, and the UI does not help. In a game whose core appeal is kinetic, that friction lands hard.

The Mid-Game Sag Is Real

Roughly 12 to 18 hours in, the seams show. Side content leans on a template — arrive at location, clear three waves of enemies, collect thing, leave — and the template repeats often enough that you start recognizing the encounter beats before the second wave spawns. The handcrafted systems remain beautiful, but beauty doesn’t fully compensate for a job board that keeps handing you the same job with different scenery.

The puzzle-platforming detours are the other divisive element, and we’ll take a side: they’re a mistake more often than not. Threading a corvette through a rotating asteroid maze to reach a hidden cache is a fine idea once. As a recurring content type, it fights the game’s own flight model — the twitchy responsiveness that makes combat sing is exactly what makes precision navigation twitchy and annoying. Wanting a slower ship in these sequences is a strange thing to want from a game this good at speed, and that tension is the design’s own doing.

Story: Sincere, Overwrought, Well Performed

Adam Roslin’s clone-identity arc is thematically ambitious and tonally uneven. The dialogue reaches for gravitas and frequently overshoots into melodrama — characters explaining their emotional states out loud, plot turns telegraphed several systems in advance. What saves it is the voice acting, which is genuinely strong across the cast and delivered with conviction the script doesn’t always deserve. The crew grows on you. The banter during flight is well-paced and does the heavy lifting on characterization that the cutscenes fumble.

The art direction is the reason screenshots of this game go viral. ROCKFISH built star systems that look like 1970s paperback sci-fi covers rendered in Unreal — hard color palettes, gas giants filling half the sky, ringed debris fields lit by nebulae in violent magentas and teals. It’s not photorealistic and it isn’t trying to be. It’s illustrative, and that choice has aged the game forward rather than backward.

A 2D-feeling arcade shooter of this scope is light on hardware by genre standards, but the design leans hard on spectacle: dense combat areas stack heavy particle load, multiple capital ships, and ultimate abilities firing at once, and that is where the engine budget gets written a check its GPU allocation can’t always cash. The UI is the weak visual link. Functional, legible, and utterly charmless — a stark contrast to the cockpit art surrounding it. Menu navigation carries more onboarding friction than a 2023 release should.

On Steam, this is a mouse-and-keyboard game that pretends to be neutral. It isn’t. The flight model’s precision aiming — particularly against the small, fast, evasive targets that populate the later game — rewards a mouse decisively. Gamepad support is competent and well-mapped, and the drift mechanic is naturally suited to a stick, but the accuracy tax against Ancient guardians is built into the design.

HOTAS users should recalibrate expectations before buying: this is not a sim, and a full flight stick setup is overkill bordering on counterproductive. The game wants twitch inputs, not throttle discipline.

The Steam version’s other advantage is the community: build guides, loot databases, and a Workshop-adjacent ecosystem of theorycrafting that meaningfully extends the endgame.

Everspace 2 is a mid-budget game that knows precisely what it is and executes that thing above its resource bracket. ROCKFISH bet that arcade flight plus loot progression would produce something greater than either half, and the bet mostly paid off. The moment-to-moment combat is among the best in its genre, and the handcrafted star systems supply the kind of exploration reward density that procedural generation has spent a decade failing to replicate.

The problems are real and worth naming plainly: a script that mistakes volume for depth, a mid-game that leans on a content template past the point of tolerance, an inventory system that treats your attention as free, and a puzzle-platforming impulse that should have been cut in review. They’re the reason this lands as a solid recommendation rather than an essential one — the flying is easy to adore, the padding around it less so.

Even so, the core pleasure — the drift-boost-kill rhythm — is delivered harder than studios ten times this size have managed. Buy it for the dogfighting. Stay for the builds. Skim the side jobs when they start repeating themselves, and the whole holds together well enough to recommend to the right audience.