IIt is good to go back to the distance to the future world. As the game preceded here, Citizen Sleeper 2 is full of evocative pictures of everyday life in space, from farmers who care about zero-G crops in an asteroid greenhouse to miners Of the water rising against the cartel that controls them, all rotates a small existence of crumbling space stations left to decompose a long Mega Corporation.
Again you were thrown as a sleeping, a robot with a digitized person thinking that shorn the memories of the person who copied it. In the first game you run from the firm to make you, trying to cut your robot off its hope with a stabilized drug. In the next incident you are playing another sleeping who has successfully managed to dissolve the stabilizer, but at the expense of being bonded with a gang boss called Laine.
Because before the action was confined to a single space station, Erlin’s eyes, the second game had been broadening more widely in a space sector called a belt. Your explosive escape from Laine will see you with a hot foot from the station to the station, with a timer signing how close to your tail the gang lord is. In this opening section is a race against time to gather enough fuel and supplies for the next leg of your journey, while looking for a way to break the mysterious link that Laine seems to have your body.
Each destination offers a visual backdrop of where you happen to visit, whether it is a long-raised border of space or an asteroid population, but most you will read the text descriptions of the what is happening and clicking through conversations. As in the previous game you have five dice combined with the start of each day (or “cycle”), and these can be plugged in different activities per location, with higher numbers that delivers a higher probability of success.
But now, dice can be broken. In time, high stakes, frustrations, stress, which can damage your dice. If the energy of a death reaches zero, it is damaged, it is not used until it is fixed. If all five dice breaks in normal difficulty, your character gets a permanent glitch: a die that always provides an 80% chance of frustration.
Join these contracts up to two crew members. As with Mass Effect 2, you can assemble staff for your ship, the rig, and each with two dice achieved in their specialties. You can also use a “push” once per rot, increasing the number at your lowest death at the expense of raising your stress. All of this makes contracts that are amazingly tense and involving, as you decide how far to push your luck to the risk of straight failure. And the frustration is slipping the citizen sleeping 2: While many games promise power fantasies, here each day is a brave struggle (at least at first). Some missions are locked if you can’t get to them on time. This is a game that encourages repeating playing, to see how things are different.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is around twice as big as the first game, with many locations to visit. But that means it feels a little stretched thin compared to the previous title. Instead of getting to know a place closely, we have a spread of space stations with minimal activities with each other. The crew also felt underused: it was a shame that there was no way to upgrade their abilities or combine them more than gameplay.
However the characters are also the greatest strength of the game, and in all of them are experts drawn, both literally (with comic book artist Guillaume Singelin again gives some gorgeous pictures) and in terms of their compelling and sincere backstories. Despite its bleeding, the world of Citizen Sleeper 2 is full of sympathy, and a joy to return to the universe Gareth Damian Martin was created.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is at 31 January
