Everspace 2’s planetary combat trailer is explosive

Everspace 2‘s planetary combat trailer has dropped in IGN’s Summer of Gaming event, and it looks awfully pretty.

Everspace 2 is an open-world (open-galaxy?) space shooter with RPG elements. Think something like Freelancer or Privateer and you’re not far off: trade, explore, blow things up, upgrade your ship. But one of the bigger differences between it and its spiritual predecessors is the addition of planetary combat, which can be seen in this trailer.

Everspace and also Everplanet

Everspace 2 actually departs from its predecessor pretty heavily too, though. While the original Everspace had the same action-y space combat it was a more linear roguelite, with you fighting your way through sectors to reach the end. Everspace 2, however, gives you full freedom to explore the galaxy as you see fit. I had a play around with an extremely early version back when the Kickstarter was active, and what I saw showed an awful lot of promise.

What I didn’t see was the planetary combat, but that’s what this trailer’s for. It looks like you’ll be able to nigh-seamlessly drop into the atmosphere of planets and dogfight with enemy ships while skimming ruins and rocks — and hopefully all sorts of other bits of terrain, too. Although I pity any city-dwellers having to dodge debris from in-atmosphere space battles.

This is from the super, super early version I played back in October, and it looked stunning then.

Considering the relatively small team, I have to say that it looks really bloomin’ good, too. While the space battles of Everspace always looked great thanks to nebulae and starlight, I’m impressed with just how good the planetary environments look. Hopefully, planetary combat will add some extra quirks to battles: I dream of dodging through ravines to shake off fighter pursuit.

The trailer also notes that a closed alpha will be coming soon, presumably to Kickstarter backers. According to developer Rockfish Games on the Summer of Gaming livestream, we can probably expect Early Access on Steam towards the end of the year.