When I picked up Hollow Knight last week, I picked up another Indie game on sale along with it. Now seemed as good a time to play Everspace, so I thought I'd give it a shot. I'm playing it on PS4, but it's on just about everything at this point, including the Switch.
This is actually not the 1st time I've played this game, as I attempted to play it while it was in Early Access on Xbox One and didn't care for it. My issue at the time was that the game seemed really eager to kill me with little explanation as to how I was supposed to play it. In the tutorial area, I ran into a group of friendly craft. This being a space game, I was scrolling through my controls trying to find a way to hail them and ended up shooting them instead by accident. They immediately killed me, and I deleted the game. Playing it now that it's in final release, I still think the game doesn't do enough to explain how you should play it in a timely fashion. All the explanations ARE there, but they're dolled out over a long period of time rather than up-front so it's not clear in the early going just what you're supposed to do.
Everspace is a Roguelike arcade-ish space combat game in the vein of something like a Rogue Squadron. You play as one in an infinite series of clones of a scientist-turned-fighter pilot. Each "run" consists of warping into a system, flying around scavenging for resources, and fighting squadrons of enemy fighters (and eventually capital ships) that warp in after you. You can usually leave the system whenever you want. You just fly towards the marker on your screen until your hyperdrive finishes charging, and you're out of there. However, if you're not scavenging for new weapons, cash, weapon & equipment blueprints, and fuel for that hyperdrive, you're not going to get very far. You also can't stay in any system for very long, or else a spawn of killer enemy aces will just annihilate you.
The combat is actually very accessible, as the controls are basically Rogue Squadron with some tweaks. You steer your ship's on-screen position with the left stick, your ship's orientation with the right, and you use the triggers for your weapons. It takes some getting used to, but you'll eventually find that you have full 360 degree movement available to you at pretty much any time. Pretty much all weapons have some amount of tracking on them, so so long as your cursor is within a close approximation of your locked-on target, you're going to be hitting the enemy (though you have a smaller cursor that you can use to lead targets for better efficiency). Just about the only thing the game doesn't let you do is roll your ship, which is pretty much automatically done to keep you from inverting yourself. In my experience, this is only really an issue when navigating wreckage.
I wasn't expecting this game to feature more Sim-ish elements, but there is a surprising amount of them here. When you lose your shields and take damage, you can start taking damage not only to your hull but also your individual ship systems like engines, life support, sensors, etc. You have to use rare-ish crafting resources to repair them, the same resources you also have to spend to upgrade your weapons & shields.
What I'm finding really smart about this game, though, are the quality of life improvements tied into the progression system. For instance, there are quests from various NPCs along with the typical roguelike "challenges" ("kill X number of enemies", etc.). While the challenges have to be completed in a single run, the quests do NOT. You can even fulfill the conditions of a quest and turn the quest in on separate runs. Also, when you die, you can spend any cash from your previous run into permanent upgrades to both your pilot and ship. However, you don't purchase the upgrades in one lump sum, but instead in smaller installments. This is very smart, as it ensures that even on bad runs there's a good chance you'll be able to dump that cash into SOMETHING. You're ALWAYS making progress (at least early on), even on runs where you die in the 1st area.
On the subject of death, the game's difficulty options are wildly different, and the game encourages you to jump between them. I've found Medium to be fairly punishing, but Easy is almost insultingly breezy. I only died on Easy because I didn't know that the game didn't want me to fly through a black hole that generated after I killed a strange enemy around an alien marker (trust me, it sounds less stupid in context).
I don't usually care for Roguelikes, but this one is clicking with me and the controls are certainly a large part of that. I like arcade-style flight combat games, but after Rogue Squadron they all went in a more "realistic" style that didn't work for me. Like, Ace Combat made the right stick rotate you instead of tilting your orientation, which instantly confused me.