Citizen Sleeper 2 Review
Citizen Sleeper 2 Review
Do Sleepers Dream of Electric Sheep?
I had a pretty strong gut feeling that I missed something after I bounced off Citizen Sleeper after a few short hours. However, after 12 hours and over 250 cycles, I can confidently say that Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a fantastic and addicting narrative sci-fi adventure that does one important thing the first game didn’t, which is offer the player more freedom.
Ironically, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a sleeper, an emulation of the first game with nearly identical features that captured the hearts of over one million people. Making a return is the a rich and evocative narrative, minimalist art style, fantastic soundtrack, but with a new story, a few new mechanics and most importantly, a journey that isn’t confined to a singular space station. Your sleeper now has the ability to travel the galaxy looking for answers.
Another Escaped Sleeper
In Citizen Sleeper, you played as a sleeper or a digitized human consciousness in an artificial body who managed to escape becoming a fugitive from the corporation that manufactured you, with the entirety of the game taking place in one location.
In Citizen Sleeper 2, you once again assume the role of a sleeper who has escaped. This time you don’t have your memories, and instead of the corporation, it’s now a gang that is hunting you down. Your journey can now take you beyond the walls of the space station as you can now venture into the surrounding galaxy and the myriad of places within it as you travel from planets to wreckage and other colonies looking for help and answers to everything.
The writer, studio head and main developer of Citizen Sleeper 2 has said that the script to the sequel features over 250k words, which is substantially larger to the original script that was around 100k. If you check how long to beat, Citizen Sleeper is around 7 hours. Having mostly focused on major drives and reaching the first conclusion for my sleeper took around 250 cycles and around 12 hours. Just like the first game, this is a narrative sci fi RPG and there is still no voice acting, which means a lot of reading, but Sleeper always gives the right amount of dialogue and exposition at a time, so it always remains digestible and blends its perfectly with exploration.
The writing was excellent and engaging, although it did lack emotionally charged moments that I was hoping for. Citizen Sleeper 2 touches on a lot of different topics and I think each person will come away with a different meaning. Despite the story being about an escaped android, I think it provides a lot of relatable qualities and poses many challenging questions to the player and will leave them plenty to ponder over, long after the last cycle.
In a game like Citizen Sleeper, everything hinges on the quality of the writing and once again it’s very eloquent and evocative, which creates a strong sense of immersion in this universe. Even without voice acting and sound effects, the writing is so vivid and descriptive that your imagination fills in the blanks as you can hear the hiss of the airlock, or the hustle of the crowd in the cantina.
The characters you encounter on your travels are all very memorable with distinct looks and unique quirks. Each character is given depth and motivation naturally without feeling forced. Each character feels authentic and this is what can make decisions harder in Citizen Sleeper 2 and trying to decipher who is being honest.
keep on rolling
As important as the writing is to a narrative sci fi RPG, one of the biggest ways that Citizen Sleeper stood out from the crowd was it’s incorporation of TTRPG elements and they are still here as every point on your journey or decision you need to make is hidden behind the roll of a dice. In Citizen Sleeper 2, these systems have been slightly expanded to add systems of stress that will accumulate with bad rolls or starvation and can ultimately result in glitched or broken dice, which in a similar way to emotional trauma, can drastically affect how you move forward.
As you also now have the ability to travel around the Starward Belt, you also need to be aware of fuel and how much it takes to get to certain areas. Playing Citizen Sleeper 2 on “Risky” difficulty, which is the medium option will provide you with an oppressive experience. You will constantly feel that you are backed into a corner going from meal to meal and pay check to pay check as you are always low on supplies, cryo and scrap. Add this stress to having to constantly juggle broken and glitched dice, and the result is a high level of emotional realism as you experience the galaxy as the sleeper would and understand first hand how unforgiving this galaxy can be.
As dreary as that might sound, Citizen Sleeper 2 is extremely addictive. There is always a carrot dangling at the end of the stick or a loose end that you want to see resolved. Whether that is completing one more cycle or getting resolution on one more storyline, there is always something that keeps you engaged.
Glitched and Broken Dice
Citizen Sleeper offered plenty of choices, including which drives to pursue and who to trust, but most of them lacked a finality. It always felt like it was more an illusion of choice and this would feel accurate when I would run into these characters later and would be able to build rapport again easily. I was hoping for tougher and more emotional choices that would alter the gameplay in meaningful ways.
One of my biggest problems is that you spend a lot of time making friends in the galaxy and gathering a crew, and even having to select which members come on expeditions, but more often than not, they weren’t there to help me. Even when you allocate your upgrade points to your skills, you will still have glaring weaknesses in your skillset, and it would have really alleviated frustration from constantly not having the right skills if I could have brought someone to do skills checks, who would likely have a different skill set.
I also found that there were just a few too many skill checks between certain plot points near the end, which is at a time when you are likely to have broken and glitched dice. For example, you need to find someone, but they could be in multiple areas, so you have to search all of them. This dragged a somewhat simple task into something more frustrating than it needed to be, which was exacerbated without having a crew mate to help me with these skill checks.
To Infinity and Beyond
Citizen Sleeper 2 is almost a facsimile, as you are once again a sleeper on the run trying to make allies who can help you. The beloved core experience returns with a few new mechanics that added depth to the gameplay, freedom to explore, and a story that over twice as big, but didn’t take any risks or innovate in a way that would have opened the game up to a much broader audience.
With more impactful decisions, some voice acting and a few cutscenes, Citizen Sleeper 2 could have taken the series to new heights, watch the narrative trailer if you need proof of this. Instead, the sequel provides a lot more of what people loved from the original and delivers a very engaging sci fi story with an addicting gameplay loop that was missing from the original.