Let's Play Everspace - A Game Review

My name is Kralizec and today we will take a look at Everspace. Everspace is a space combat game, with heavy rogue-like elements and crafting from Rockfish games. It is currently in early access on Steam for 27.99€ or your regional equivalent.The game is expected to come out in a full version in the first quarter of two thousand seventeen.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

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Video review

Text review

Let’s start by going over the options menu.

Controls

First off, we have the controls, the game has full controller support, so if this is the kind of game you prefer to play on a controller, you totally can. But I personally play this on the keyboard and mouse and the controls on them are very good. But you can rebind essentially everything, which is a very good thing, because if you are used to having different controls, you can have them here as well.

Display

In display s we have the usual Unreal Engine 4 settings starting with resolution, which starts at a very low 800 by 600 and goes up to 4K. Three display options: Windowed, Border-less Windowed and Fullscreen. A Vsync option that allows you to also smoothen frame-rate – essentially occasionally turning Vsync off, whenever there could be a chance of stuttering. Then we have two FOV sliders, one for the 1st person view and second for 3rd person view. They both go up to 110, but I feel the default setting is pretty good. Next are a few graphical presets, pretty normal, going from low to epic. And next are the sliders for individual graphic settings. Sadly, there is little information to them, so it will take a bit of tweaking here and there to know which settings are impacting your hardware the most if you will want to squeeze a bit more FPS out it. Again all of these settings go from low to epic, but there isn't a lot of them, it would be nice to have more and seriously, more information would be so useful. The choices we have are Anti-Aliasing Quality, Effects Quality, Post Processing Quality, Shadows Quality, Texture Quality and lastly View Distance Quality.

Sound

The sound settings provide three separate sliders, one for music, one for sound effects and the last one is for voice-over.

Game settings

In the game settings we can find a slider for when does the camera shake, the default setting off, but you can also choose your camera to shake upon important things happening or to shake upon everything. The second choice of the game menu is vibration. If you are using a controller that supports vibration, here you can choose to either have it on or off. Third option is to reset to current run and the fourth option is to reset the whole game.

Summary

Altogether, the options menu is good when it comes to game-play, but the graphical options could really use more choices and more information on what exactly are you changing and how will it impact the games performance.

Now let‘s jump into the game and see what‘s it actually like. I've played about 5 hours at the moment, so I've progressed quite a bit in the rogue-like part of the game.

First off, lets talk about the most obvious thing. This game is gorgeous. If there is even a small shred of a person who loves space in you, you obviously have to agree with this. Unreal Engine really shines here and allows for some breathtaking visuals. The game is obviously even designed around this fact, as is has a great option for taking screen-shots right in menu, freezing time allowing you to find the camera position that is just perfect and then take the screen-shot. I’m even using an image from the game right now as a wallpaper on one of my monitors. Yeah, I am a sucker for space. The planets look great and even get a bit of detail when you come closer to them, effects fit the game very well, explosions evaporate after a small moment (as they should, since no oxygen – no fire), seriously, this games visuals and the mood it creates is just awesome.

When we are on the topic of mood inducing tools, we should have a few words about the music and sound effects, starting with the latter. They sound very good, though they are a tiny bit immersion breaking, since everybody these days knows, in space, there is no sound due to a lack of a carrier medium… like air. I’d understand sounds for crashing into stuff, nearby explosions, since then you could argue the sound is carried through the hull, those could even be somewhat muffled, because of the shields you have around your ship, but when it comes to things like explosions in the distance, yeah, I wish those would be silent.
The music is good, nothing special in my personal opinion, but you can make an opinion for yourself as now I will play a bit of it for you.
At the moment there are two ships available and both look very good, the medium (also default) ship looking like probably the most stereotypical sci-fi ship ever and the light ship is obviously inspired by the Star Wars TIE fighter, just taking their own spin with it. There will be one more ship type coming, the heavy one, but at the moment it’s not in the game so I cannot say anything about it.
One more interesting thing about this game, it should also be playable in VR. That’s where the 1st person mode should come into play very heavily. And honestly, if I had a VR headset, I’d definitely play this game using it, since this looks like a great game for VR as cockpit games ,where you essentially sit at one spot even in game, are the best for it.

And now it’s time to talk about the actually important stuff. Game-play mechanics. And there are a few core ones: Combat, Resource Gathering, Crafting and Rogue-like elements.
Let’s start with combat and that also means how the ships actually handle. And they do handle pretty well to be honest. All the controls are tight and precise and are pretty well thought out in terms of their layout. You can easily do tight turns, boost out of paths of rockets and do some generally impressive things. And this directly translates into the combat itself.
Combat feels just great, enemies can and will try to engage you from different angles, use drones to make you loose focus of them and when it comes to dogfights, they won’t attack one at a time but force you to fight several of them at once.
There is a decent number of weapons to choose from, ranging from the most basic pulse laser to dark matter rockets annihilating everything in the wake of the explosion. I personally prefer the beam laser, as it nostalgically reminds me of phasers from star trek. Using your weapons requires energy, of which you have a limited amount, but if you aren’t using it firing your guns or boosting, you regain it at a decent pace.

Next up is resource gathering, the task you will be spending most of your time actually doing.
Flying around, looking for all resources at the location you are at the moment. There is quite a number of them to be gathered and some are more important then others. Probably the most important one is fuel, as you need it to safely jump from one location to the other. The second most important are most likely nano-bots, as those are used to repair your ship, both in terms of the hull and in terms of the individual parts of your ship, like sensors or life support. It’s always a good idea to keep a healthy supply of them on you ship.
The rest of the resources are used mainly for crafting or trading. Mining is done very quickly, taking just a few seconds of weapons fire and then flying near them.
The second part of resource gathering is done through finding containers that contain either more resources or some tech that you can choose to incorporate into your ship or discard it, getting materials from it.
All of this makes each individual run different and greatly increases the games re-playability.
The variance in how many resources you can actually find at a given location is huge. Occasionally there will be just a few nodes to mine and other times you will be given a plethora of resources to pick up and then use.

And use them you will, more specifically on crafting. Over time you will gather more and more blueprints, allowing you to craft the specific pieces of gear you like, once you get the resources in that particular run to build it.
Crafting is pretty simple, you just pick what you want to build, click it and it gets built if you do have the necessary resources for it. But I do wish that the crafting menus would be a little more clear and gave you easier access to the choices you actually have available. But once you get used to them, they do serve their purpose and crafting is not really the meat of the game.
You can also use your resources to improve your equipment, usually at the cost of of more energy consumption, decreasing the amount of energy you can use for your weapons and boost.

Lastly there are the rogue-like elements of the game. These come in two forms, first being the procedural generation of locations, meaning each and every location you visit is unique, both in terms of its visuals and in terms of its content. This fact guarantees you get something new with every play-through, again,adding towards the games re-playability.
The second portion of rogue-like elements comes after every run, where the credits you gathered are carried over and allow you to improve your ship with perks. There is a decent number of perks available for you to choose from, ranging from things like improving the basic speed of your ship, through making your scanners better, up to additional slots for equipment.
All of these things together create a very good game, but it all could be wrecked by pacing, just like No Man’s Sky was. I am glad to say, this isn't the case here. Each location you visit can be usually finished in a matter of minutes. Sure occasionally you will get one, where there are so many resources scattered around, that it will take you a bit longer to get them all, but even then it’s a 10, 15 minutes tops and if you are bored with it, you can just point your ship towards the jump-point and move on to the next location.

The last thing I want to talk about is the games performance. I run a pretty good rig, with a nVidia 1070 GPU and the game never fell under 150FPS for me at a 1080p. So it should run good for most of you guys out there, keeping at 60+FPS on almost every rig with the appropriate settings.
To conclude, the game is handles well, run well and looks just incredible. If you enjoy space games, this is something to definitely keep on your radar for its soon coming release. I've certainly had my fun with it. But also remember, this video was done on an early access version, things may change, but I doubt they will be changing very much, at least the things I actually talked about here shouldn't change much.