Welcome to our review of Everspace: Stellar Edition, an Indie Rogue Starshooter, out now for Nintendo Switch! Will you be the new Han Solo?
Everspace is developed by Rockfish Games, an independent game studio based in Hamburg Germany. They are specialized in creating high-quality 3D video games for PC and consoles in Unreal Engine 4. It was founded by mobile games veterans Michael Schade and Christian Lohr, who have been joint entrepreneurs in the space of 3D graphics for over 25 years. As founders and managers of Fishlabs Entertainment, they spearheaded 3D mobile gaming for almost a decade before they took on a new adventure with Rockfish Games.
Everspace – Stellar?
Their first big game after founding Rockfish Games is Everspace, originally launched through Kickstarter in 2016 (with a stunning 420.252 Euro) and now ported to the Nintendo Switch. For those unfamiliar with the game, I’ll give you a quick summary, before we head into the actual gameplay and pros/cons.
Everspace is a rogue-like space shooter that is divided into 7 sectors with randomly generated levels. This means you’ll never fly through the same sector (in theory), and this can be compared with the dungeon system of The Binding of Isaac or The Crypt of the Necrodancer. Everspace takes this concept into space with gameplay and controls which are very arcade-oriented. This was done to make the game feel more like a shooter than a space flight simulator. Sadly it didn’t, the game really felt like an arcade flyer with collecting and upgrading elements, but more on that later. The goal of the game is to reach the last sector (number seven) and fight the end boss there. Within each sector, there are a number of locations with varying content and difficulty. Players progress to the next location by using their jump drive (aiming towards the green rotating icon). You can only use these jump drives when you have enough fuel, otherwise, you’ll explode!
Exploration is rewarded with valuables and resources, but as soon as the Okkar fleet starts spawning in, it is recommended to move on to the next location. The Okkar is an alien race that was at war with the Colonial Fleet and now traverses the demilitarized zone. This zone is basically a place where the Colonial Fleet won’t come and the Okkar can do their thing. In Everspace death is not regarded as a failure but as an opportunity to take a breath, upgrade your ship with the gathered credits, maybe even buy a new ship and move on. You will die a lot of times in the beginning. Everspace is not an easy game. Like I said before, it’s a rogue-like experience and you are expected to die. Death brings rewards, but the game does not explain how to use those rewards to the maximum.
Everspace – Pros & Cons
The story unfolds as you progress to new sectors, and even reaching sector seven will just trigger a new series of events that allow you to revisit all sectors and discover new challenges and foes. Storywise I won’t spoil much since you’ll have to discover it yourself to keep the experience unique.
I already mentioned that I had a few issues with the game, but that doesn’t mean that Everspace is a bad game. There are some aspects of the game that really bugged me. The controls are meant to feel like a shooter, although the enemies make you do barrel rolls and become motion sick if you don’t watch out. You can track enemies with a press of the right control stick, but that won’t mean they became easier to take down. Hunters and drones will spin around you and destroy your shields in an instant, which leads to death. After a few runs, I figured out the controls and discovered that the only way you can play this game is in TV-Mode with a Pro Controller. Really, don’t ever try this in handheld mode. If you do, place a bucket beside your game spot.
The story is good, voice-overs are done pretty well and made me feel like I was beamed into a combination of Mass Effect and Star Trek (with a pinch of Star Wars, or Battlestar Galactica). The graphics, not so much. The artwork is overhyped in my opinion. Yes, space looks good on a big screen and yes the spaceships are nicely stol-, reworked from various space-series and -movies. But once the game has loaded a lot of big stuff (asteroids, wreckage) the game can’t progress the lot and turns into a pixellated hunk of goo. Once you’ll get close enough the game renders the asteroids and adds details. Once everyone’s loaded, the game looks gorgeous – but once you enter another dogfight the game turns into a pixellated heap of goo again, with frame drops and even more confusing controls (since you’ll see red squares on all sides).
” Finally, be prepared to die and ponder, is it worth my 40 bucks?”
The same goes for the in-game menu. If you press the – (minus) on your controller of choice you’ll enter the overview of the game. You can upgrade and repair your ship, craft new .. stuff? Everspace doesn’t really explain how to craft, which is a shame. You can craft really cool stuff by finding blueprints in space. Destroyed an enemy outlaw? Blueprint. Found a trade ship? Blueprint! Oh, but you’ll need materials you won’t find until sector four or five, good luck! Loot can luckily be found all over the place. So you will be spending some time exploring a zone before jumping to the next one otherwise you might miss something important like a new weapon. So yeah, it would have been nice if there was some sort of tutorial system that gives a little bit of insight in the deeper layers of Everspace. It’s this extreme amount of details that make the game great, but most of the people playing this, won’t uncover these details, lore, upgrades or sectors since they are put off by the extremely high difficulty bar.
Conclusion:
Everspace is ambitious, deep and sadly not really well ported on the Nintendo Switch (graphics wise). True, I don’t play Nintendo Switch games for the graphics, otherwise, I would have played games on a PlayStation 4 Pro. But still, it’s not the game you’ll be getting on the eShop, at least if you go by the screenshots posted there. The gameplay is solid, once you’ll play it on a TV Screen with a Pro Controller in your hands. So my advice is, read into the crafting system and how to upgrade your ship to make good runs (I did) and be careful out there, think about every action, monitor your ship systems and upgrade as much as you can. Finally, be prepared to die and ponder, is it worth my 40 bucks?
