Caltrops - Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number





	[quote name="Mischief Maker"]Neither game is a full space-sim, they're defined by their hook. Chorus has a great hook. You're essentially Darth Vader if he was filled with remorse after blowing up a planet and joined the rebellion, but still used his dark side powers for good. You're dogfighting in space, but you also have "Shadow of Mordor"-esque magic powers to tilt things in your favor. Everspace 1's hook was that you're being pursued by an armada and the clock is ticking. So every second spent dogfighting for keys, mining for crafting materials, skulking through space wrecks for treasures, and so on were made that much more exciting because you were pressing your luck. Once the armada arrived, escape was not guaranteed. Everspace 2 removed the time pressure and hoo-boy does that make everything boring. Space-mining for the OCD hell of it is dreadfully dull, but it's kinda mandatory because the game is heavy on the level-scaling and you are constantly replacing your components with higher-level but otherwise identical guns to keep pace with the universe's ambient difficulty level. Everspace 1 combat was equal parts reflexes and resource management, but in Everspace 2 when time and resources are effectively infinite, even the shooting gets dull and "ball-y" like the bad space shooters from back in the day. Also: Chorus and Everspace 1 had a clear aesthetic with super detailed ships, but Everspace 2 feels like too many Chefs. The spaceships that weren't directly ported from 1 have this weird cartoony bulbous quality to them that I really don't like. In Everspace 1 I would get excited at the ship model changes as I advanced through the meta progression, but in Everspace 2 I get to a space station selling new ships and none of the randomly generated fighters make me say, "ooh, that looks cool, I wanna fly that!" Also in Everspace 1 there was a night-and-day handling difference between flying the scout verses the default fighter, but in Everspace 2 I bought a scout and things barely felt different. All the level-scaling RPG crap sucked the life out of the action gameplay. The engine in Chorus is super optimized and you can switch from open space to cramped interior locations in a blink with the framerate remaining buttery-smooth. In both Everspace games, entering a planet surface or space hulk interior will always give your FPS a kick in the balls. People hating on the character of Nara in Chorus just hate female protagonists who aren't designed as fap-material. Her voice-acting is excellent. Clone Adam's voice acting, on the other hand, has always been the Everspace series' main weaknesses. He sounds like he should be the goofy dad on a sitcom, not a hotshot flying ace going through an existential crisis. Come at me![/quote]