EVERSPACE™ 2 - Wrath of the Ancients

Overall it was a decent experience, I liked the story well enough and there's a really decent amount new content. But so many key issues with the game remain unfixed and unaddressed by the developers who've now moved on, so I can't really recommend it. Playing on harder difficulties is an exercise in frustration and luck - enemies have such high damage that taking even a few hits will kill you, and the defensive abilities that you have that should be able to mitigate that (like teleporting out of the way) are basically useless because they track you completely perfectly, and the enemy numbers are so high. Easier difficulties aren't really challenging outside of the hardest activities, and even then the difficulty is in this same form. It never feels like you're really challenged to play effectively, or like your skills are important. You're left to resort to either picking enemies off from a mile away or hit and run, neither of these very engaging after a short while. I have found some success in higher difficulties even through the hardest activities, but it always ends up feeling like luck after dozens of attempts. The expansion has some great moments where you're fighting much larger enemies, but despite it being what players have asked for pretty much throughout development the endgame activities are just YET MORE duking it out against literal hordes of fighters. It's frankly bizarre that the final battle is more or less exactly what has been wanted by a lot of people as a bit of enemy variety... But along with the final battles from the main game, it remains just a one off. It's especially a shame because at its core the game is *excellent*. Flying feels great, exploration is pleasing and well rewarded, personally I like the puzzles a lot. There's a lot you can do in the endgame to refine your build... But for what? Another fight against 100s of fighters all of which can seemingly pinpoint exactly where you are at all times? Wowee, can't wait. So much wasted potential, it's quite disappointing really.

I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of this DLC. Much, much better than Titans. Decent amount of story and side missions, some new weapons, equipment, and end-game content (thought it is just more grinding), and very pretty design for the newly added systems and locations. I rather enjoyed the story and was broadly satisfied with the conclusion, however [spoiler] it would have been nice to get some more story missions or sidequests for cleaning up/pacifying the Okkar Prime extremists. That seemed like a loose end, especially given that Imroth returns in a side mission. His death also seemed rather... lackluster and I wish there was more acknowledgement in the story regarding his return and eventual death, especially since his bio entry indicates he is a very renowned figure among the Okkar Prime. [/spoiler] Those loose ends could have been wrapped up more cleanly and that's my only major criticism. Side quests were generally interesting and compelling, I enjoyed completing them. Performance and optimization could use some work - I'm running an RTX 3080 Ti and i9-12900KS, and I get a solid 100+ FPS on max graphics in most base game locations, however the areas added in this DLC dropped me to a modest 60-70 in most locations, and even down to 40-50 FPS in the larger, denser locations. I was a little disappointed by that but overall it didn't much affect my enjoyment of the content. Also +rep to the devs for reducing the price at launch. I felt it was a fair price for the amount of content delivered, it took me about 6h to finish the story and another 10-15h to finish the side quests, puzzles, and achievements. Overall: 8/10 great job, I enjoyed it :)

So much content for such a reasonable price. If you liked ES2 you'll want to grab this DLC.

absolutely worth it