Video Game / Everspace

Just another day chillin' with the Okkar.

EVERSPACE is an arcade 3D spaceship simulator/roguelike game with procedural environments developed by Rockfish Games (creators of the Galaxy on Fire series). Also, get ready to die, a lot. It's essentially if FTL: Faster Than Light was in 3D and you could actually control your ship. The two games in fact have incredibly similar mechanics; roguelike elements, a sector map that you jump from point to point through to get to the gate at the end, pursuing enemies that dog you if you linger too long and a sense of progression and reward.

In the distant future, the Colonials (consisting of mankind and a few other species) entered an uneasy truce with an alien race called the Okkar. The Colonials and the Okkar had found themselves evenly matched, and fought an extremely destructive war over the resource-rich Cluster 34. To enforce the truce, a demilitarized zone was established between Human and Okkar space. This demilitarized zone is off-limits to Colonials, with the exception of the single human corporation that secured mining rights. The player is a pilot trying to make their way through this demilitarized zone, which is effectively a lawless place full of outlaws, hostile aliens, and lots of riches.

Everspace was originally developed for macOS and Microsoft Windows. It has since been ported to Linux, as well as the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch consoles.

A Kickstarter campaign for Everspace 2 began in 2019 and entered early access on January 18th, 2021.

---

This game contains examples of:

• Advancing Wall of Doom: The Okkar forces that are following you catch up after you've been in a sector for a while, and will continue to deploy powerful Okkar units until you jump to the next zone. Wait long enough, and a Colonial warship will jump in: it cannot be destroyed with any weapons accessible to the player, and its firepower is so overwhelming that, unless the player immediately turns tail and jumps to the next system, they will be destroyed.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Some weapons ignore shields and directly damage the hull, such as plasma fire and corrosive missiles.
• Asteroids Monster: Splitters, as the name suggests, split when the original is destroyed, creating several weaker copies which must also be shot down.
• Attack Drone: Drones are commonly used by all factions, yours included. There are specific anti-drone weapons and drone-only attacks.
• Bandit Mook: Outlaws Cargo Thieves can steal your resources. Killing them releases all the stolen goods.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: The four player ships firmly fit:
  • The Interceptor is the balanced, middle-of-the-road option with average speed, hull, energy, and item capacity.
  • The Gunship has the most amount of hull and weapons and consumable slots with the ability to use turrets, but has the slowest engine and can't use regular shields except a temporary Front Shield Generator.
  • The Scout has the fastest engines with upgradable sensors for evading enemies and gunfire, but the lowest amount of hull and energy and lower item capacity.
  • The Sentinel has average hull and engines, but the lowest amount of weapon slots. In return, it has the highest energy capacity and regen with the highest amount of device slots.
• Boring, but Practical: Stasis missiles are unspectacular because they do zero damage. However, they can disable an enemy ship for 8 seconds, leaving it vulnerable to your onslaught.
• Boss-Arena Idiocy: The battle against Admiral Gorc's Colonial Warship would be unbeatable if Gorc showed tactics befitting an Admiral. Instead of swarming you with his endless squadrons of cloned Okkar fighters, he sends two at most to harass you, while he shifts power from his unbreakable deflector shields to a slow-firing Wave-Motion Gun that can be blocked with a single asteroid. Especially foolish since he first activated his shields in response to you surprising him with a nuclear missile silo, and it takes five total nuclear strikes to bring him down.
• Bottomless Magazines: All primary weapons have unlimited projectiles, even ballistic ones. However, you'll eventually exhaust all your energy, forcing you to release the trigger button and let the energy core replenish itself.
• Bullet Time: The Time Extender, which boosts the pilots reflexes to superhuman levels for short periods of time.
• Charged Attack: The Shock Rifle does pathetic damage when fired, but if you charge it first, the damage unleashed will be many times more powerful. The Scatter Gun can also be charged.
• Casual Danger Dialog: You and HIVE will sometime delve into this while under fire from enemy attacks.
• Cool Gate: The jumpgates that link the sectors that form the demilitarized zone.
• Cosmetic Award: Defeating some ships will award you with a new color for your ship.
• Damage-Sponge Boss: Carriers and frigates have a huge amount of health, lots of weapons/drones, and other gimicks, but as a tradeoff are easier to evade.
• Deadly Dodging: An effective way to get neutral parties to fight for you. Lure enemies to G&B ships and duck behind them at the last second. The enemy fire will hit the G&B ships and will cause them to go hostile toward your enemies.
• Deflector Shields: The Interceptor, Sentinel and the Scout come with a shield, but not the Gunship. Shields recharge over time as long as you don't take any hits. If the shield is fully depleted, it will shut itself down before recharging again.
• Disc-One Nuke: The ARC - 9000 can be found early on if the player gets lucky with drops and spawns, which will allow them to take down almost any of the earlier ships in one hit.
• The Dragon: Seth Nobu, to Admiral Gorc.
• Early Game Hell: It's easy to die early on with a barebone ship, little loot and a very unlucky jump in an extremely dangerous sector.
• Effortless Achievement: You get achievements for things like finishing the enemy-free tutorial, or for dying.
• Energy Weapons:
  • Energy weapons are available along with ballistic weapons. Energy tend to be more effective on shields.
  • Lasers can be fired in bursts or in long beams.
• Elite Mook: When you see a skull symbol hovering over a ship, prepare to face a badder, stronger and sturdier enemy than usual.
• Expendable Clone: Zigzagged. The player character has his memories uploaded to a new clone body upon death. On the other hand, when he comes face to face with his original, who had hoped to transfer his own mind into the clone body to avoid dying from slow, incurable poisoning, he sees the clone has developed an independent mind and gives the clone the means to continue his existence while he himself dies peacefully.
• False Flag Operation: Admiral Gorc's plan; to unleash a horde of subservient cloned Okkar on Colonial space and provoke retaliation, allowing him an excuse to exterminate the Okkar.
• Fantastic Caste System: The Okkar follow a very hierarchical caste system where every individual's destiny is chosen at their birth: servant, warrior, cleric.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: All ships are capable of going faster than light. All you have to do is to aim at the jump coordinates. This will jump you to next zone and at the end of all zones, you need to connect to the hypergate to jump to the next sector.
• Final Boss Preview: The Colonial Warship that attacks if you linger through the Okkar attack waves is being captained by Admiral Gorc, and you take the fight directly to his ship in the final confrontation.
• Flash Step: Teleporters work this way by teleporting the player forward. It can only be used by the Scout.
• Fragile Speedster: The Scout ship. Less hull strength, a weaker shield, but faster and able to equip teleporters. With the right weapons and mods, the Scout can turn into a Glass Cannon, like using the Shock Rifle for outgunning enemies and cloaking/teleporting to evade them.
• Fun with Acronyms: Your AI buddy the HIVE: Human Interface Virtual Entity.
• Gatling Good: Available as wing-mounted cannons or as a turret. Gatlings are good against hulls but weak against shields. Your starting ship carries two of them as part of its basic loadout.
• General Ripper: Admiral Crin Gorc, the Big Bad, who wishes to reignite the Colonial-Okkar war in revenge for the death of his family.
• Glass Cannon: Drones are powerful, but have no shields, so they go down easily to a light missile or sustained gatling attack.
• Gunship Rescue: You can launch a distress beacon and G&B ships will come to aid you. Of course, they will attack you if you've pissed them off in the past.
• Homing Projectile: Most missiles will follow targeted ships unless they are shot down, avoided for a time, or completely miss. Missile turrets for this reason are particularly lethal. If you take the Beeline subroutine, enemy missiles will never lock on to you. Unfortunately, your own missiles will never home either.
• Hyperspeed Escape: The player has this option to get through each sector to reach the jump gate. However, some areas feature a jump suppressor (a spinning device hidden somewhere in the map, or if the player is very unlucky, on a capital ship such as an Okkar corvette or Outlaw drone carrier) that must be hacked and disabled before moving on. If a Colonial Warship jumps in and the player hasn't moved on, this is the only option the player has; engaging a Warship is suicide as it cannot be destroyed and will annihilate you in very short order.
• Interface Screw:
  • Should your sensors get damaged, you will lose all the useful user interface icons indicating where to find loot and where enemies ships are. On top of that, your vision will get blurry, if not downright glitchy.
  • There's a type of hostile drones that does nothing but disable most of your HUD elements for as long as they're active. Needless to say this is not helpful in the heat of battle.
• Interchangeable Antimatter Keys: Access keys are dropped from destroyed Elite ships. They can open any door or locked crate, in different ships, in different sectors.
• Item Crafting: Once you acquire blueprints, you can craft various equipment and weapon upgrades.
• Jack of All Stats: The Colonial Interceptor. Its specs and performance are average compared to other ships and it doesn't excel in any particular area.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The AI instructor for your ship has a supercilious, critical personality, but it can and will compliment you when you do well. (Sometimes.)
• Kill It with Fire: Plasma throwers spit flames of hot plasma, bypassing shields altogether.
• Limited Loadout: Your weapon and device slots are limited depending on the ship you use. You can upgrade the number of slots with perks.
• Lizard Folk: The Okkar are described as space reptilians.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Missiles are usually more devastating on hulls than shields. The Seeker Missile Battery in the expansion can fire multiple ones simultaneously. All ships can install it except for the Scout.
• Magnetic Weapons: The Coil Gun fires projectiles magnetically.
• MegaCorp: Grady & Brunt Prospects, G&B for short. The corporation is so vast and powerful that mining operations and colony efforts wouldn't be possible without them.
• Mighty Glacier: The Gunship. More armor and heavier weapons than the other ships, but lower on speed and agility and lacks shielding (it can equip a frontal shield, but its usefulness is debatable.)
• Mirror Match: The Adam Roslin you're playing as occasionally crosses paths with other clones of Adam Roslin in the same type of ships you're piloting, which almost always results in a battle to the death since both Adams need the DNA fragments in the other to fix their genome.
• Mook Mobile: Enemies ships aren't sophisticated as yours. However, they come in far greater numbers and their weapons, drones and equipment should not be underestimated. Some are even ace pilots.
• My Species Doth Protest Too Much: The DLC adds a wandering Okkar trader. He didn't like his predestined job as a servant and exiled himself in the DMZ.
• Necessary Drawback: Some Glyphs and Subroutines will provide you with a perk, but will penalize you in some way.
• Negative Space Wedgie: Some nebula you run into will have strange effects on your ship, like disabling your sensors.
• Neutral No Longer: G&B are indifferent to your fate and will only defend themselves when threatened. With a specially acquired glyph however, they will always be hostile to the Okkar.
• Nintendo Hard: The game is a rogue-like and is veeeeery difficult, even on the easiest difficulty. Expect to die and respawn a lot. It's not unusual for enemies to absolutely swarm the player upon jumping into a new sector, with multiple Bombers, Marauders, Scouts and other enemies ganging up on the player along with Webber drones and missile turrets. Lampshaded by the "Welcome to Everspace" achievement, which has the simple requirement of "Die."
• No Social Skills: Adam is described as this. He is shy and isn't good with people, preferring to focus on his studies. This got him bullied by his peers back at the academy.
• Not Afraid to Die: Played with. The protagonist is not afraid to die, because they are cloned and have full memory of the last run after each death.
• Old-School Dogfight: You need to fly close enough to the enemies to fire your weapons, although some weapons can pick up targets well outside of visual combat range, such as the shock rifle.
• Precursors: The Ancients, a precursor race of the Okkar who achieved "enlightenment".
• The Paralyzer:
  • Webber drones can immobilize your enemies for easy picking. Unfortunately, so can enemy ships.
  • EMP Generators disable all ships in an area for a limited time.
• Piñata Enemy: Destroy enemies and they'll drop all manner of resources, including credits.
• Pure Energy: Ancient Wardens and Splitters have no hull, only shielding.
• Ramming Always Works: You can destroy enemies by ramming them, if you have sufficient resources to repair your ship afterwards. You can even earn an achievement for ramming a certain amount of drones.
• Random Drops: Loot from containers and destroyed vessels is random. Playing at higher difficulty or having the proper perks will increase the chance of better loot drops.
• Reluctant Mad Scientist: Adam Roslin, who was blackmailed by Admiral Gorc into making a clone army of Okkar for his False Flag Operation plan, and the father/original DNA source of the cloned protagonist.
• Regenerating Shield, Static Health: In full effect. Shields automatically recover after not being damaged for a short period of time, but hull integrity and systems require nanobots or other resources to repair.
• Resources Management Gameplay: You need to decide which limited resources will be used for what: cash, nanobots, scraps, etc, don't grow on trees.
• Rewarding Vandalism: You get prize money for destroying a certain amount of floodlights and fuel depots.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: You can craft anything instantly on the fly, all from the comfort of your pilot seat. It's possible HIVE does all the crafting for you. Either way this is a good thing, otherwise you'd be dead very soon.
• Scenery Dissonance: The environments you fly into are very beautiful. Too bad some of them have shipwrecks from the war, planets' remains and brutal combat takes place everywhere you go.
• Scenery Porn: Lots of it, making it a gorgeous space game.
• Sentry Gun:
  • To compensate for its lack of shields, Gunships are the only ships capable of using turrets. The turrets will target and fire at any hostiles automatically. They come in gatling, laser of missile flavors.
  • Enemy turrets are stationed on starbases, wrecks or around asteroids. They will make your life miserable.
• Sprint Meter: Your ship can boost its speed, but this drains your energy reserves.
• Shock and Awe:
  • The Lightning gun, which is a starter weapon for the Sentinel.
  • Lightning storms are natural hazards you can encounter. They will damage your shield, but they can recharge your energy core.
• Shotguns Are Just Better: Scatter Guns are space shotguns! Best used at close range for maximum efficiency.
• Skill Scores and Perks: You do not level up in this game, but you can spend your money on various upgrades. Perks can be purchased at the start of the game after you died. Skills are analogous to primary and secondary weapons which can be upgraded for superior firepower or less energy consumption.
• Skill Slot System: The game use this scheme for your weapon slots, consumables and devices. You can increase the amount of slots by spending your credits on the appropriate perks.
• Space Battle: Both dogfights and naval space are present in the game. Unfortunately for you, you're very much alone against everyone and allies extremely are rare.
• Space Clouds: There are literal space clouds at some nodes which impair sensors and prevent the Okkar from pursuing you in that node. Another variant covers the area in darkness, severely limiting visibility but not impairing sensors or pursuit.
• Space Cold War: The humans and Okkar have a peace treaty, but they are many skirmishes in the DMZ from both sides. Both sides are preparing for the next conflict as the situation is still volatile.
• Space Fighter: You and all the factions make use of these for combat.
• Space Is Noisy: Very loud. You hear everything in space, from explosions to weapons firing.
• Space Pirates: The Outlaws. They very much behave like space pirates: raiding and attacking anyone while running afoul of authorities. There are different factions of Outlaws.
• Starter Equipment: When your first play the game, you first ship is the Colonial Interceptor. You get a Pulse Laser and a Gatling Gun for weapons. Light missiles, a weapon overdrive and a shield booster complement the rest of your equipment.
• Stealth in Space: Cloaking devices are available, but only to the Scout ship.
• Subsystem Damage: It's possible for a large number of ship systems to become damaged, which begins to impede the ship's ability to function.
• Super-Reflexes: The Time Extender works by boosting the pilot's reflexes so that they see everything in slow motion.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Ancient Wardens drop a black hole when they die.
  • Even though Adam can eventually bring down Admiral Gorc's warship, Gorc still manages to overload his reactor in a final act of spite for the man who ruined his ambitions. Adam coolly informs him that "this wouldn't be the first time he died" right before the explosion levels the entire area, and Adam's certainly not exaggerating.
• Teleport Spam: Those damn Ancient Wardens will teleport every time you fire missiles at them.
• Tractor Beam: Construct a tractor beam and it will expand your limited range for picking up items.
• The Unfought: You encounter Seth Nobu multiple times over the course of the game. It gives the impression you're going to fight them at some point as a boss. This seems empathized when you reach Sector 7 and he kills your friend/your original's sister. However, you find Seth at the end of your first completed run, mortally wounded from the lab's security systems, cursing and mocking your current clone with his dying breaths.
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Some areas have a black hole as an environmental hazard, with very desirable crafting materials (Dark Matter and Dark Energy) floating around its event horizon. To retrieve them, you have to fly close enough to grab them then use your boost to escape, the ease of which will depend on how far you've upgraded your boost through perks. Fly too close and it will suck you in, spelling instant death. Tricking an enemy into doing this is an occasional side mission.
• Villains Want Mercy: When Adam has Admiral Gorc's warship on the ropes, the Admiral opens a line to Adam and begs him to come aboard to the negotiation table and discuss terms. Given the outcome of the original Adam's last face-to-face with Gorc, Adam's having none of it.
• The Voice: You'll hear HIVE's voice, but you'll never see him.

research in cloning allowed Colony HQ to amass a large number of pilots for the war effort.]]

• We Used to Be Friends: Adam's and Seth's friendship began way back before the war, while they were still attending the academy. Now Seth has a vendetta against Adam, or rather you, one of Adam's clones.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Credits are the primary currency in this game. The dollar sign is the symbol used.
• Yet Another Stupid Death: You can die in very stupid ways, like firing explosive warheads at point-blank range, ramming capital ships while un-shielded or calling G&B for help when you're already hostile with them.

---