Everspace 2: Galactic Edition shadow dropped digitally on Switch 2 last month, coming bundled with the main story and subsequent DLCs, having debuted back on PC and consoles in 2023. The single-player spaceship shooter charts a dramatic story across the stars as the player battles enemies, explores an open galaxy and upgrades their ship. The new bundle contains the Titans and Wrath of the Ancients story content packs alongside the Supporter Pack containing a bunch of cosmetic ship items. Interestingly, Hamburg-based developer Rockfish Games charted a completely different path for this sequel to 2017’s Everspace, which at the time took the form of a procedural roguelike. Everspace 2 also becomes the latest port to arrive on Switch 2 having boasted high fidelity graphics and framerate on PC and the other consoles – and represents another good test of the capabilities of Nintendo’s system.
When it comes to quality space combat and exploration games on the Switch, there isn’t exactly a lot that immediately comes to mind. No Man’s Sky of course exists on the platform, but the spacefaring is just a small aspect of that. No – for pure dogfighting through asteroid fields and based entirely in the cockpit of a starfighter, the options are thin on the ground. Step forward, Everspace 2: Galactic Edition, which brings more than 50 hours of space-based story and side content to play through, and more than 120 handcrafted locations.
Handcrafted is a key point. While its predecessor focused on a roguelike gameplay loop, Everspace 2 instead puts together a handcrafted linear story, putting the player behind the stick of clone Adam Roslin as he explores the systems of Cluster 34 in a bid to escape the dangers of the so-called Demilitarized Zone, a war-ravaged area of space where outlaw gangs, corporations, space-faring settlers, and alien species vie for control.
While the story is more than serviceable – with Adam meeting a whole cast of interesting characters and being told through a series of hand drawn graphic-novel style cutscenes – much of the title’s lore follows directly from the 2017 original. For those not versed in the franchise, it loses a lot of the impact, and the sometimes rather dull dialogue and exposition does nothing to win anyone back to paying attention. While the narrative is nothing that sets the world alight, it is merely a conduit to serve up the game’s key selling point, which is its excellent movement and combat.
That combat is exhilarating, with a whole host of customisable and upgradeable weapons and abilities complementing slick controls that allow Adam’s ship to zip and weave around these huge maps. While sometimes space combat games can feel restrictive on a gamepad – often relying on the full suite of a keyboard – here strafing and accelerating works excellently using the left stick to move and right stick to aim. Although it’s sometimes easy to accidently use the wrong ability on the d-pad or the wrong item when holding in the B button while in the heat of battle, using the Pro Controller also allows the additional mappable back buttons to alleviate some of the limited clunk.
In the flow of battle, though, things are delightfully hectic, with tons of ships on screen at any time and really satisfying shooting. Yes, the action isn’t going to flow quite as well as those playing on PC given the 30fps compromise on Switch 2 – a compromise that also stretches to the lack of any cockpit view presumably on technical grounds – but this never feels like it detracts from the moment-to-moment gameplay.
What helps with how exciting combat is is the sheer number of options to customise the player’s ship. While this isn’t the roguelike original, the amount of loot in areas will give even the most completionist gamer a real treat with places to explore and rewards to collect. Each sector in this map is its own handcrafted little open world in which Adam is free to explore every nook and cranny. From random enemy encounters, gatherable resources that can be collected and traded for better gear and money, all the way to abandoned shipwrecks containing their own Zelda-like dungeon puzzles and rewards, there is a lot to do here. The trading system is surprisingly deep as well, with systems having their own prices for commodities depending on the current demand. It rewards those who take the time to plan different smuggling runs across the galaxy with the likes of ramen, seeds and medicines.
While there is no shortage of galaxy hopping as a result, the only shame is just that getting to each of these locations does take the player out of the experience somewhat. Although the scale of the more than 100 locations on offer is excellent in itself, the fact there is literally a black loading screen between each does somewhat strip away the immersion, especially when there are so many quests to take part in, which have Adam jumping from place to place and thus experiencing the loading break often.
That said, while compromise has been made in that regard, from a graphical point of view the spaces and worlds themselves look high quality on Switch 2. Graphically the experience holds up very well both docked and undocked when compared with the likes of the Steam Deck, for example. Lighting is excellent and explosions pop in the blackness of space. If there is a criticism from the visual presentation it comes from the UI itself just being a little cluttered with things going on and sometimes becoming distracting when getting attacked from a host of different directions.
