Like I played Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward VectorI couldn’t get the image of a “falling a whale” from my head. When a whale dies, its giant bodies sink into the dark depths of the seabed, feeding and nourishing the entire deep-sea ecosystem. The world of citizen sleepers has experienced its own climate events. This science fiction story takes place in the shadows of the former monolithic Solheim Corporation, which is now falling apart. The collapse of this giant led to a new way of life. Everyone has survived the outcome of this collapse, cleaning its meat and picking the bones neatly. The sleeper’s story is one of hundreds, and everything cultivates the courage of the fallen Leviathan.
Read Also:
Manage cookie preferences
As someone who loved the first citizen sleeper, my feelings were that I didn’t need a sequel. It felt completely “complete”. What else was there left to explore in this world? Well, I know that’s Many Plus, and I quickly fell in love with this harsh but beautiful transhumanist world. I was really sad when the credits rolled. Like its older brother, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a reflexive, destructive, and fully absorbed sci-fi adventure.
You play once more as a sleeper of the same name. This is a human mind surrounded by prosthetic bodies, skeletal metalwork and synth flesh. You wake up as amnesia and your long-term memories remain, but short-term memories are not moved from your body. After panic and blurry of action, you find yourself as you run again. You may have escaped your company creator, but this time you have become a powerful enemy now, trying to escape from your “friend.” It turns out that the universe gangs don’t like it when you want autonomy on your own body.
You are now forced to start a new life as a runaway, surviving gig work and dice rolls. Everything is told through inspiring texts, and the sleeper explains all the sights, smells and sounds around you. Visually, it only shows the outside of the location, and you can view events by clicking on the location marker on the map. Citizen Sleeper’s RPG system works in the dice economy. You can roll the dice five times at the beginning of the day (known as the cycle), apply the results of each dice to the action, and move the clock forward until the target is finished. The higher the roll, the successful results. Gig work is essential to achieving your goals, as energy and money are your priorities.
The places you can travel and the available contracts can be seen on the map, but you will need enough fuel and supplies to travel.
The entire storyline of the first game takes place on a singular space station, so you slowly build acquaintances in places where you will work regularly, where you know which food vendors make the best grabs, and the few friendly faces you can rely on. This sense of safety has completely disappeared in the Citizen’s Sleeper 2.
This requires moving up and down a wider network of stations and satellites known as belts. The safety of knowing around one place is completely gone, and the tension of having to go ahead of the tracker means you need to be prepared for what awaits you at the next place.
This nomadic mindset is the biggest difference between CS1 and CS2. tension. Delicious tension. The Citizen Sleeper 2 really puts the pressure and stress on running and trying to survive. Criticism of CS1 is relatively easy to put yourself in a comfortable place. Small warning: That doesn’t happen here. And it will be a better game. I noticed at the beginning of the second day when the sailor woke me up with a morning greeting saying “We’re in trouble.” This sleeper cannot take a break. Plus, it means you too.
It’s intense, but exciting. The Citizen Sleeper 2 has a bold new set of systems that really add to the thrills. One of the biggest new introductions is the contract. A massive wage mission with great risk, where you need to fly to place and carry out missions under time pressure. You also need to hire a crew to help you. Each member has their own skills and dice that you can assign.
Many things don’t work with these contracts, and the big ones are stress levels. Each time a skill check fails, the character takes one stress counter and when the crew takes over too much, he succumbs completely from the mission. If the sleeper takes on too much stress, it can break the dice. Very bad. Failed checks can also cause an event crisis. This needs to be resolved to ensure that the mission is on track.
With all the dice, stress counters, crisis events and countdowns in mind, these deals are dishonest and fun. Carefully assign crew dice, look at numbers and symbols, and push your luck by pulling away dangerous movements. I crossed my fingers, prayed in which space, and prayed in a space where there was a 50% chance of negative outcomes not being bitten by the butt. That feeling was high that I had been chasing forever, so it meant I took a bigger risk than ever in the first game.
It is very important to choose the right crew. You need to relax and predict your shopping list for possible reasons that are wrong. Sleepers have RPG style classes with upgradeable abilities, but one skill is always completely blocked and cannot be upgraded. This means you need to rely on others for your weaknesses. Like real life.
Standing up against an event that requires skill checks can mean trouble if none of the crew is good. This system can lead to seeing characters as a walking dice set for free use of the characters, but over time you will find them survivors just like you who have their own nasty stories. You can decide who will be able to join your crew forever and learn more about them over time. It’s important to think about their skills and utility, but they feel more than just a tool. They are like sleepers, and spirits of their tribes. Your ruined spaceship will become their heaven.
You may even come across a familiar face from adventures. The current sleepers are different from the sleepers in the first game, but seeing them is still a bit of comfort. It’s been years since my first game. That means it has changed. Hardening and rough around the edges. It is facing and truly drives the way life in a world grabbed by the cruelty of corporate capitalism can change people.
This sentiment is achieved spectacularly through the writings of Citizen Sleeper 2. This remains as rich as the first game, punchy and visceral. Gareth Damien Martin gives a heart to the bustling city and brings the machine to life – it’s a wonderful and inspiring writing. I never forgot screenshots of so many quotes that I couldn’t forget. My screenshot folder usually serves as a photo album for holiday snaps in a virtual adventure. Here it is like a passage to the page where you listen to your dog from your favorite book.
s** proof of how good the writing of t is I’ll do it When you hit the fans, the direction in which the story enters is just as interesting, and sometimes even more so than when things go smoothly. Citizen Sleeper 2 has an RPG style story decision that will be pushed against you in the story section. There are no dice. It depends on your current skills. Whatever the outcome, you can always rely on wild events. I was excavated into the centre of a frozen asteroid, unable to cause a rebellion on the labour ship, and helped to build the colony foundations on met stones chatted with the broken hearts of dying machines – it was an absolute roller coaster.
One great writing I want to highlight without giving spoilers is about the character Seraphine. Wake up at the start of the game and you will see that Seraphine is one of the first people you saw, and soon you will see that the two of you share history. But because of your amnesia you don’t remember him. You do not recall the friendship you shared, it is completely lost. This is pretty devastating. Seraphine must go through the sadness of losing a friend, and the sleeper needs to tackle the feeling that he knows them to someone but can’t return that connection. This situation is painful and completely felt by both characters. It’s an emotional human drama, and it emphasizes the entire game from start to finish.
However, the two learn to reconstruct what is lost, the epitome of a large picture. Everything is always in a state of change, the sleeper, and the world in which they exist, is a state of transformation, a process that never ends. To reconstruct what was before and see some ruins as a beginning rather than an end.
Between transhumanism, capitalism, power and technological meditation, it is a human story about real people. There are no Space Wizards, no Ship Shooting, no Heroes. The everyday reality of those trying to survive. It’s incredibly grounded and I’d love to see more in sci-fi. The world of Citizen Sleeper belongs to its waste scavengers, dirty engineers, repair technicians, freight carriers, and everyone else in this wild asteroid belt. I don’t want the glamour and luster of Starfield, Star Wars Outlaws, or Cyberpunk 2077. I want a grounded, punchy story about no body. That’s the Citizen Sleeper 2. A great start until 2025.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector arrives on PC, Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Series X | S, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 January 31st. This review is based on PC code provided by the publisher.