PC Gamer UK 01.2021 @InternationalPress75

W

hen you start up a free-roaming space

shooter, the last thing you expect is to be

flying down a tight and twisting tunnel,

in search of something called the ‘core’.

There are anemone-like creatures all over the

walls, and they fall easily to your ship’s lasers.

game, but revealed that it wasn’t when

you picked away at the surface, the beta

has more ships, more characters, more

plot, more infinity. The voices are provided

by a text-to-speech app right now before

the voice-acting is added, and sound like

you’re being lectured by jerky robots, but

the game has something extra: it hangs

together right now as a scripted

experience rather than a collection of

disparate areas in space.

A SHOT IN THE DARK

Freelancer, from 2003, is still very much

the reference, but while that game tended

toward long wheeling dogfights where the

objective was to get on your opponent’s

tail and stay there, in Everspace 2 there’s

always something in the way – be it an

asteroid or the rotting superstructure of a

long-abandoned industrial facility. The

ability to move vertically up and down

plays into this, making it possible to hide

and pop up to surprise your target

• particularly useful when hunting defence
  turrets or getting close enough to a
  jammer to disable it. Bandit craft and their
  drones scatter everywhere, leaving threat
  markers spread across your HUD. Long
  cutting beams fill the void, the red trails of
  missiles burning toward targets, and if
  you’ve got the right gun equipped you can
  join in with the light show, dazzling pink
  projectiles arcing toward enemy ships.
  And while the voices may be
  placeholder, the glorious cosmic
  backgrounds, crystalline caves and
  floating wreckage – as well as the chunky
  fighters you pilot – are looking extremely
  good. Special mention too for the sparse
  cutscenes rendered to look like paintings.
  Rockfish Games’ decision to delay is a
  positive one, then: a launch with more
  polish at a dry time of year, avoiding the
  gravitational waves of a big release, could
  be exactly what the game needs.
  Ian Evenden

CUTTING BEAMS FILL

THE VOID, THE TRAILS

OF MISSILES BURNING

TOWARD THEIR TARGET

PLAYED

IT

Be nice to Freelancers, they may

come back with homing missiles

EVERSPACE 2

You don’t even know who you are at this

point, referred to as just ‘the wingman’ on

comms, but once you’ve defended the

core, and the miners trying to exploit it,

from a giant drill that lets in angry drones,

you’ll be slightly closer to finding out.

This is the closed beta of Everspace 2,

the final stage before its Early Access

release in January. The game is running

from the gravity well of Cyberpunk 2077,

rescheduling from a December release

that saw CD Projekt’s own delay threaten

to crush it. The other side of Christmas,

the theory is, it can shine.

And there’s no reason why it shouldn’t.

While the prototype build looked like a

Everspace 2

PREVIEW

RELEASE

January, 2021

DEVELOPER

Rockfish Games

PUBLISHER

In-house

LINK

everspace.game

NEED TO KNOW

Now, imagine all

this is on fire.