Bottom Line: ROCKFISH Games built the space shooter that arcade pilots have been asking for since 2003 — a gorgeous, generous, tactile dogfighter wrapped around a loot treadmill that actually earns its grind. It stumbles on melodrama and mid-game filler, but the flying is so good it buys a lot of forgiveness.
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 produces 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. You will spend real minutes of your life in menus doing spreadsheet work, and the UI does not help you. 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 I'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 makes precision navigation twitchy and annoying. Several of these sequences left me wanting a slower ship, which is a strange thing to want in a game this good at speed.
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 that the script doesn't always deserve. Your crew grows on you. The banter during flight is well-paced and does the heavy lifting on characterization that the cutscenes fumble.
