SpaceBourne 2 is an ambitious game considering it’s made by a single developer. The ability to run around, shoot enemies, loot their corpses, and then jump on your ship, fly from a planets surface into space, and get into a dogfight… This formula is extremely hard to replicate, and so far we’ve only seen a handful of games do it well. However in saying this, I have a lot of issues with this game currently, and wouldn’t recommend it.

If this is your first game like this, it might surprise you, but if you’ve played Star Citizen, it leaves a lot to be desired. I will say that what this game achieves is impressive, with space/atmosphere flight feeling a lot better than No Man Sky, but comparing to Star Citizen it does feel like a poor imitation of what that games achieves – which is understandable given the development time and development team size.

My key main issues that I immediately experienced: crashing on startup and crashing on settings change; extreme lag in city areas, and hitching in space areas; motion blur is over-the-top even at its lowest settings, with seemingly no way to turn it off; outside the cities the planet generation goes from flat to bumpy, with nothing to really explore/look at; the main tutorial stops you from using certain key binds, making you feel like the game doesn’t work properly; most voices are AI generated, and a lot of sounds are abrasive to the ears; mouse sensitivity is extremely high initially, and if a setting did exist to change it, I didn’t want to crash just to try adjust it; you have to double press space to skip dialogue, which is tedious/repetitive; there is a lot of doubling of UI elements, most likely due to some poor implementation of chromatic aberration, which turning down in the settings didn’t fix; in general there is just too many motion effects on screen, which when you add in the lag I was experiencing, I could easily see making people motion sick.

This game has a lot to work on, as you can see, and this is just within the first 52 minutes, which should realistically be the best part of the game with the most effort put into it. This review is more of a warning, that while it’s impressive what a single developer can accomplish, this game is early access, and at this price point, is not worth it - currently.

If the developer decided to push this game further by hiring people with the money he’s made from it, or even just putting together a Discord community, making it open source, and allowing people to help him with bug fixing, this could flourish into something truly amazing… However I can’t help but feel like this is another permanent early access game.

SpaceBourne 2 is an ambitious game considering it’s made by a single developer. The ability to run around, shoot enemies, loot their corpses, and then jump on your ship, fly from a planets surface into space, and get into a dogfight… This formula is extremely hard to replicate, and so far we’ve only seen a handful of games do it well. However in saying this, I have a lot of issues with this game currently, and wouldn’t recommend it. If this is your first game like this, it might surprise you, but if you’ve played Star Citizen, it leaves a lot to be desired. I will say that what this game achieves is impressive, with space/atmosphere flight feeling a lot better than No Man Sky, but comparing to Star Citizen it does feel like a poor imitation of what that games achieves – which is understandable given the development time and development team size. My key main issues that I immediately experienced: crashing on startup and crashing on settings change; extreme lag in city areas, and hitching in space areas; motion blur is over-the-top even at its lowest settings, with seemingly no way to turn it off; outside the cities the planet generation goes from flat to bumpy, with nothing to really explore/look at; the main tutorial stops you from using certain key binds, making you feel like the game doesn’t work properly; most voices are AI generated, and a lot of sounds are abrasive to the ears; mouse sensitivity is extremely high initially, and if a setting did exist to change it, I didn’t want to crash just to try adjust it; you have to double press space to skip dialogue, which is tedious/repetitive; there is a lot of doubling of UI elements, most likely due to some poor implementation of chromatic aberration, which turning down in the settings didn’t fix; in general there is just too many motion effects on screen, which when you add in the lag I was experiencing, I could easily see making people motion sick. This game has a lot to work on, as you can see, and this is just within the first 52 minutes, which should realistically be the best part of the game with the most effort put into it. This review is more of a warning, that while it’s impressive what a single developer can accomplish, this game is early access, and at this price point, is not worth it - currently. If the developer decided to push this game further by hiring people with the money he’s made from it, or even just putting together a Discord community, making it open source, and allowing people to help him with bug fixing, this could flourish into something truly amazing… However I can’t help but feel like this is another permanent early access game.