When I played Everspace 2 last year and came away vaguely dissatisfied. It wasn’t a bad game, but it wasn’t a great game. So far, Rockfish has put out some smaller freebie “endgame” activities to keep the grind going, but their Titans DLC is intended to put a fresh hunk of storyline (in two quest lines) in front of the players. Unfortunately, their efforts come off as considerably underdone.
Both halves of the Titans expansion center around massive objects. Smaller than a planet, but bigger than the large vessels which you come across from time to time flying around the DMZ. Both quest lines start at Prescott Station, one of the major space stations which you operate out of during the main quest. One quest line has you tracking down interplanetary megafauna, the “leviathans” (of which you’ve seen skeletal remains previously). Finding them isn’t terribly hard. Protecting them from the crazed Redeemer cultists who think the creatures are their ticket to transcendence is a bit stickier. You’ll literally have to go into the belly of the beasts at times, even as you’re sort of shooting them to give them an upset stomach. The other questline involves the last functional dreadnaught-weight vessel in the DMZ. Naturally, it’s been hijacked by pirates, and you’re the only gunslinger in the sector dumb enough to try and take it on. That won’t be easy, and it will involve a lot of smaller operations to truly cut it down to size. Once you’ve finished the quest chains, the activities become repeatable for new loot.
There’s really nothing new here as far as the visuals, audio, or even gameplay as such. You’re still flying around, still getting random loot, still grinding away to be able to get new loot. Rockfish states that there are new weapons gear types, new item sets, and new legendary items, but finding them is going to take an inordinate amount of time and dumb luck. You’re not exactly visiting wildly new areas in a general sense. Same old systems from Everspace 2. Rockfish’s promises of six hours of storyline seems vaguely inaccurate. While the Leviathan content seems to be pretty straightforward (and perhaps a callback to the roguelike origins of the original game), the Dreadnaught content relies on the same irritating “puzzle” mechanics which made so much of the base content in Everspace 2 such a pain the first time around. Compared to the strategic battles found in classic space sims like Freespace or more recent content in No Man’s Sky, the Titans efforts at massive space battles feel incredibly clumsy. Worse, Rockfish felt like this was worth charging somebody for instead of making it another freebie like their “Incursions” activity. And to what end? Grinding for more gear.
You may be thinking, “weren’t there supposed to be storylines?” There are, though one could be forgiven for perhaps thinking the Titans DLC might be better off without them. The Leviathan storyline (such as it is) centers around shooting things for science. Your contact/quest giver, Dr. Maya Kapadia, is definitely on the “wholesome/nerdy” end of the scientist stereotype spectrum. Unfortunately, her earnestness becomes grating very quickly. As for the Dreadnaught quest lines, you’re getting marching orders from an ex-spy named Cardenas, paired up for several missions with a motley assortment of “colleagues” who have specific abilities which will be required to take down the massive ship. Each of them is an annoying caricature of a trope defining stock character (grizzled veteran, drunken ace, mechanoid-merc-with-heart-of-gold). As with the base game, the characters don’t endear themselves to you, and the storyline just doesn’t seem to have the sense of stakes needed to make you care. About the only thing missing here is the motion comic style cutscenes, but that’s really not a great loss.
As a rule, expansions and DLC content packs are supposed to enhance and improve the original experience. Some expansions pull this off magnificently, such as The Shivering Isles for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion or Alien Crossfire for Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. This is not the case for Everspace 2: Titans. They’ve given players a bunch more loot to chase after, but they’ve managed to degrade what was already a pretty shaky narrative component in an overall middling game. Think about that for a moment: the developers made their game worse narratively by adding in new storyline elements. I don’t know how that managed to happen, and I would say this DLC is not worth the extra money as it puts out a certain small amount of content above what would be considered a “minimum”. You can safely skip grabbing Everspace 2: Titans, since it’ll probably get packaged in as part of a “Complete Edition” later.
Axel reviewed the Everspace 2: TitansDLC on PlayStation 5 with a review code.
