Parents' Guide to Everspace

As it stands right now, this space shooters biggest issue is that it feels unfinished and not fully fleshed out. This stands out at first glance when you start the game, with generic menus using default fonts. On top of that, some major strikes against it are its seemingly intentional efforts to regress on genre standards without improvements or notable innovations: For example, without a radar and with a very limited sensor range, you'll be annoyed at your inability to get your bearings, no matter how much you upgrade your ship. Since your objective is to fly around and open containers, you can wind up blindly stumbling into deadly situations or accidentally getting lost. Plus, If the punishing difficulty doesn't assure ship destruction, the game's collision detection with other spacecraft can be just as devastating as fire fights with enemies. Further complicating all of this is the strict time limit on each stage: If you wait too long, you won't be able to tell whether mission-critical objectives have warped out, been stolen, or if you simply lost track of them.

As such, this makes Everspace not really a space-combat game and not really an exploration game, but some blend of the two. Further making the title unsatisfying is the fact that no matter how many resources you amass to upgrade your ship after each "game over," the upgrade trees are too granular in their scope to enable huge shifts in your strategy. The best you can hope for are tiny tweaks in your approach, coupled with patience in learning how to navigate, how to power through, and how handle the lightweight diplomacy (whether to shoot someone or not to) in each game. There's a lot here, but much of it needs to be rethought, and the rest just is just too shallow to merit lengthy sessions.