Author: TheAleosha

Completed Everspace.

The final boss really requires to bring every trick you’ve learned up your sleeve. The cruiser summons fighters with Corrosion Missiles, that penetrate shields and just a couple of those can finish most ships. So my bet was on Gunship, that doesn’t have shields anyway, and plenty of hull. Front shield also helps negate some of these. Still, you need a lot of repair items, and a lot of luck. Cruiser regenerates shields quickly, and the missile flies slowly, so a few times it hit the cruiser when its shields were already up again. And you need three pairs of eyes, to watch both the cruiser with its wave of flame attack at the fighters, and their missiles, all at the same time. It’s not a fun mission, I must say.
I also finally figured out what to do on the Ancient Temple map. Turns out you can fly inside the temple and summon the Ancient, or whatever that is. Luckily, on the run I discovered this I was running a Scout with “sniper rifles”, and Okkar can’t chase you there, so you have all the time in the world to chip at this fire blob and hide behind asteroids. It’s ironic that the perk that I’ve got from achieving this task is that those Ancient Depots are shown on the star map.

The game becomes more interesting as you acquire more blueprints. At first it’s the runs are mostly about luck. Then you starting gaining the ability to craft Nano Injectors to preserve your Nano Bots and repair your ship when you need them most.
By now, I completed runs with all the ships, I could say. “Could say”, because once you collect all 8 DNA samples the corrupt admiral appears in a cruiser, which is impenetrable for your weapons, and you need to launch missiles from a silo at it.

As I mentioned, Gunship doesn’t have regenerative shields at all. But it does have an impenetrable shield at the front, that can be activated once in a while. Combined with a turret and some drones, that makes Gunship quite formidable. Managed to do a couple of successful runs with it.
One detail that enormously impressed me is that when you destroy a frigate, it doesn’t simply evaporates. It turns into a hulk, that you need to navigate in order to get some of the loot trapped inside.

The approach this game has for perks is… interesting. There are stations you can find that hold perks. But in order to open the door to the station, you need Access Key, that randomly drops from some enemies. And once you’ve got it, you also need to guess behind which of the two doors the perk is. The second door usually just holds bunch of powerful weapons, but nothing persisting.

On the 16th attempt, I even managed to reach my destination, with the Scout, no less. The main struggle was with a frigate that blocked my path at one point. With it, you cannot jump out of the sector.
Luckily, I had ARC-9000, which is Everspace’s version of BFG.

But even with that, I just wasn’t putting enough damage. But I had lots of resources onboard. So in a very sci-fi manner, I started producing rockets to finish off the frigate.

Storywise, a human admiral planned to set up a false-flag operation, and the original Adam was forced into cooperation by being poisoned. He escaped, kicked off a clone production, and put himself into cryostasis, in hopes to switch bodies with one of the clones that would reach the lab. But even you as the cloned that reached it is flawed. So now you need to collect DNA pieces to prolong your lifespan.

A solid excuse for a few more runs, I’d say.

I really respect space sims that get anything besides fighters/interceptors right. Unlocked the Gunship, and it is actually quite different from the Interceptor you start with, which is great.
The turret is not always active, you need to activate it when enemies get close, but is still very helpful, as are the drones you can emit. The downside is that you don’t have regenerative shields at all. So any damage you need to repair yourself.

Then I unlocked the Scout. At first I couldn’t understand how such a flimsy craft could be effective. But the more appropriate name for it should be “sniper”. As it is equipped by default with a weapon with twice the range of most of the enemies. And it’s the only craft that has stealth ability. So you can snipe, run away, and repeat.
The downside is the time. You’re bein chased, so after a few minutes the enemy fleet usually teleports into the sector, forcing you to escape to the next one.