Spacebourne 2 Review – Space Action Strategy RPG – Freelancer Meets Civilization in this Test

Free Mankind from Bondage in this Dark Space Epic – Spacebourne 2 offers a very interesting mix of Action-Combat, Role-Playing, and 4X Strategy – Read all about it in this Game Test and Game Review

SpaceBourne 2 is a space-open-world sandbox, with lots of spaceship combat, but also action as a soldier on stations and planets. It offers an extensive story around the liberation of mankind from slavery and a complex space conquest part that offers long-term motivation in the style of a 4X strategy with combat, diplomacy, and sophisticated battles.

In this SpaceBourne 2 Test / Review, I will show you everything you need to know about the new single-player space simulation. Space action combat mixed with role-playing elements and 4X strategy. The gameplay is reminiscent of classics like Freelancer, Wing Commander, Star Citizen, Elite Dangerous, and a bit of the upcoming Starfield. Spacebourne 2 was released for PC and Steamdeck on Steam in Early Access with a release date of February 17th, 2023, and still has a long roadmap of what else will be built into the space sandbox open world.

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This post is available here as text and as a YouTube Video (German Voice-Over, English Subtitles). So you can choose how you like to enjoy it most.

SpaceBourne 2 Review Video

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

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Intro

Hello, here is the Zap. In this Spacebourne 2 review, you get a little insight into the new space action game with a mix of spaceship combat, 3D shooter, and RPG elements as well as some 4X strategy. I’ll tell you how it is played, and what’s in it, and at the end, you’ll get a rating from me. But most of all, I want to give you all the info, so you can decide for yourself if you might enjoy the game.

Spacebourne 2 is developed and self-published by DBK Games. So far, there are already two games from this studio, Mesel and its predecessor Spacebourne, but neither of them is available on Steam. I received a free trial key, my thanks for that. This shouldn’t affect my rating though, as I always test all games with the thought in the back of my mind, how would I feel if I had paid full price?

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Background – Early Access and Release Date

Spacebourne 2 entered Early Access on Steam on February 17th, 2023. It is neither bug-free nor completely finished. So if you like to have “perfect” games, you are wrong here.

But for a small development team, it’s quite amazing what they’ve accomplished so far. And they are diligently updating, so more content is coming almost weekly and the bugs should become less.

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Game Type – Space RPG with 4X Strategy

If you want to outline it very roughly, Spacebourne 2 is quite similar to Freelancer, or the early Wing Commander parts. I also see similarities to games like Star Citizen, Elite, StarTrek Online, or a bit like the upcoming Starfield.

It is a space role-playing game, both with 3D combat in the spaceship, as well as a first-person shooter on the ground or even in a spacesuit in zero gravity. There are thousands of planets and space stations in hundreds of systems to choose from as destinations, and we move from one planet to another using warp jumps and stargates.

We can dock at space stations, but we can also land on planets. We fight wild space battles with dozens of ships. Now and then we explore cities and caves on foot, and sometimes we get out in a spacesuit in the middle of space to board alien ships or wrecks.

What’s more, we can take different co-pilots with us, who improve different bonus values. As the game develops a bit, we eventually become squad leaders and get wingmen to accompany us in combat, either with their own controls or with close control through our commands to the team if we wish. And these soldiers can level up with us, and if necessary we can also recruit new fighters.

Gameplay – Story and Roleplaying

In the distant future, humanity is far down in the hierarchy of the universe and many are enslaved. We are the son or daughter of a former leader of mankind. Our father has already tried to free humanity himself, but he failed and was killed. Right at the beginning, we rescue an old robot, who turns out to be our father’s former personal advisor and who will assist us from now on.

We start with a tiny spaceship and find new equipment for us and our spaceships from defeated enemies or in the numerous stores of the space stations and planets. Thus, we gradually upgrade ourselves and meet new contacts, some of whom we can recruit into our ranks.

There is a full RPG system, both for the character and the spaceship or later even multiple spaceships. We can level up our hero in the three categories of soldier, pilot, and adventurer, improving his nine basic stats and thus learning 45 skills, which we can also increase in several levels.

Our character, as well as the spaceship, both have all sorts of equipment slots that we can equip with various weapons and gear. We often get the items we need for this from defeated enemies as loot. There is the usual white, green, blue, and purple “normal to epic” item system. We can sell the bad stuff on space stations and buy new high-end equipment or even completely new ships from different ship classes.

Spacebourne 2 offers 7 guilds, where we can rise in ranks and thus get more and more tasks and better equipment in their stores. These have very different orientations, and possibly not all guilds are suitable for every play style.

In addition, there are 5 factions with a total of 36 houses that dominate the universe. And the goal of the game is to free the oppressed humanity from the bondage of these factions and make our own faction flourish.

How exactly we do that is up to us, we can create an absolute democracy, become a just ruler, like a wise Space King, or become a nasty oppressor ourselves, throwing space into chaos and mercilessly persecuting all non-humans.

SpaceBourne 2 Screenshot Gallery – Ingame Pictures (Part I)

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Gameplay – Factions and Strategy

In addition to our space hero and the flying vehicle, we will also build our own faction. Our goal will be to lead humanity out of slavery and to wage war against the alien races that oppress us and killed our father.

In the course of the game, we will build our own bases for this purpose and recruit an army. This army has to be organized and trained, we need certain resources to make upgrades, and we have to send our units on relief missions and also raids against enemy stations and other bases. And there are hundreds of them. More than 30 other houses exist and most of them are hostile.

Such raids are planned beforehand in a complex way, with a battlefield simulation, where we can deploy all the squads to the attack targets and plan precise movement sequences in the individual combat phases. This is very impressive, what Spacebourne 2 delivers here. And the actual battles don’t need to hide behind it, not at all.

Here the game combines its space shooter focus with a lot of strategy elements and that’s a wonderful combination. Later on, politics, diplomacy, negotiations, governance, and many other details are added, combining everything into a wonderful “space conquest simulation”. So this becomes a sort of 4X space strategy, with us in the middle of it all as an actual character at all times.

Tech, Graphics, Sound, Engine, Translation

Spacebourne 2 is developed with Unreal Engine 4, and this mature basis is also noticeable in the game because it didn’t crash once in more than 25 hours of testing. It offers detailed 3D models, both for the spaceships and for the interiors of the space stations to walk around in. Unfortunately not as detailed as one would like, but already a fantastic achievement for a small studio.

It also runs very stably in terms of game mechanics. Although there are sometimes bugs, like getting stuck in models or in rare cases failing controls, when you drop out of the game in between. But thanks to a convenient savegame system that always creates autosaves even when you change systems, this is not too serious a problem. I had a few quests that didn’t work, more about that in the conclusion.

The dubbing of the battles, space stations, and also on other occasions is at least already so far that there are sounds. They’re not always great or impressive, but at least you never get the feeling that it’s way too quiet. So a good start for an Early Access game, but definitely still expandable.

The music is lower middle class, although I’m not an expert and usually play without music, just for copyright reasons for my YouTube recordings.

The voice output has also definitely reached a minimum level. All important texts are narrated in English, even if they are artificial voices from an AI generator. But here, at least, care has been taken to include as many different voice variations as possible, and to use them throughout for the important characters. And since it’s often about androids or alien races, the voices are even sometimes quite appropriate the way they are.

The game is built entirely in English, though there are a few linguistic blunders there as well. Spelling errors as well as sometimes somewhat unclear speech samples are still present, but this only bothered me extremely rarely. There is the possibility to switch the user interface to some other languages, German is also included, only the quality of these texts is still very, very poor.

You could always grasp the tutorials, the story, and also all the surrounding stuff well, even if it is not linguistically perfect. Some texts don’t have speech samples yet, but that has appeared surprisingly rarely, at least in the first 25 hours of gameplay.

How well does Spacebourne 2 run on the SteamDeck?

Spacebourne 2 is halfway playable on the Steam deck, but sometimes still a bit uncomfortable to use. It therefore currently has an official rating of “playable”, i.e. yellow.

Some texts are difficult to read and since you need to type on the keyboard several times, it is necessary to get out the virtual keyboard to type. Overall, it’s not optimized for the Steam deck, but if you can make a few sacrifices, it’s at least halfway usable.

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SpaceBourne 2 Screenshot Gallery – Ingame Pictures (Part II)

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Spacebourne 2 Test – Opinion and Conclusion

Let’s start with the negative things. The game is not yet fully developed, but the Early Access label reveals that already. Even though the basic framework is quite complete and you can play it throughout most of the game, you will run into construction sites from time to time. Then either the level design is somewhere between not pretty at all and completely unfinished. Or you’ll get quests that don’t work because quest objectives weren’t spawned or the scripts for them weren’t quite finished.

But at least in the first 25 hours of gameplay, that only affected side quests that weren’t necessary for the overall story and progression of the game. So you could just cancel the quest, accept another one, and continue playing.

Sometimes pretty, but not always, and this still appears like a construction site sometimes.

Overall, the graphics could be a bit prettier, in some places. But for a small team, DBK Games already offers good mid-range here and sometimes even gorgeous views.

But at the latest, when it goes down to the planetary ground, you have to lower your expectations, because there the graphics often look more like in the year 2000. And the level design also looks very unfinished most of the time. But there are outliers upward here, too, but unfortunately quite rarely.

I was bothered by the fact that the warp jumps are a bit long. There are skills and ship improvements that lower these travel times, but especially at the beginning you spend many game minutes looking at the warp tunnel.

The graphics are still a bit dull in parts, but then again very detailed. This sometimes results in a somewhat uneven feel, so that the world doesn’t always look like it was made from one piece.

Well-thought-out interface, good controls without twisting your fingers

On the plus side, the controls are surprisingly straightforward. The interface is also easier to grasp than it has been in almost all space shooters I’ve played. There is no excessive focus on artificial simulation complexity here, but rather more focus on the combat action. I liked that a lot.

Some space sims are rather off-putting because you first have to learn dozens of keys by heart before you can get the spaceship to move halfway. Here Spacebourne is quite exemplary and rather intuitive to use. And since this is what the game is all about, this is an extremely important plus point.

Space from one cast, from the warp tunnel down to the planet without a loading screen

One really standout feature, where most space games can’t keep up, is that you can land directly on the stations and planets and also walk around. And this goes seamlessly from space to station or planet, with no loading screens. Oh yes, the camera can be switched between first person and third person at any time, whether as a character or in the spaceship.

We use the option to walk around as a person for trading and also for mission conversations. But there are even combat missions where we have to storm stations, explore caves, hack computers, and many other tasks as a soldier.

Here, Spacebourne 2 reminded me a lot of StarTrek Online. Unfortunately, the combat feeling in these missions is not yet as 100% as one would wish. Invisible obstacles, enemies stuck on objects, or shooting paths blocked by building elements when they shouldn’t, sometimes still feel somewhat unfinished. But it’s great that this exists in the game. It’s also fun, original, and on the whole a real enrichment to the game. But there’s still some fine-tuning to be done here in terms of controls and shooter feeling.

Space conquest simulation included – Space Civilization and we’re right in the middle of it

After some time, a completely different game section opens up next to the space shooter, which expands the game enormously once again. The faction and world conquest set is overwhelming at the beginning. What the developers have come up with here is extremely extensive and simply excellently done for long-term motivation.

Space is huge, hundreds of systems and thousands of planets and stations are in play. I’m not entirely sure, but it could be that Spacebourne 2 can even generate infinite new systems in the end. And you can conquer this whole universe little by little, space station after planet after the battleship, and turn it into either a nasty and bloody dictatorship or a perfect-world wonderland, or whatever else is in between.

You always have to make decisions in conversations here, and you can precisely adjust the policies of the new human empire with all sorts of switches and sliders in a sort of state-boss interface. And this also has a massive influence on how satisfied the inhabitants are and how quickly new people join you. To do this, you have to carry out missions again and again, which, in addition to money, reputation, and experience, also bring new soldiers to your army.

I could go on forever in detail about this complex area of the game. But I hope this already gives you a rough idea of what DBK Games has created here. And I suspect that this part of the game will be expanded even further. There are many possibilities for this, and the path taken so far is already very promising.

Early Access, there are still many construction sites, but it’s already fun

I have to repeat, not everything is ready yet, it’s still Early Access. Some edges are still in the game, some textures are still muddy, and the voice outputs are artificially generated. But what the game offers as a whole, in the end, has already excited me very much, even in its early form.

Due to an enormous amount of role-playing elements, which are also well implemented, Spacebourne 2 already offers a high replay value and excellent long-term motivation. So you can also enjoy playing a round in the Spacebourne universe again later on.

I am very curious to see where the journey through space will go with Spacebourne 2. The current Early Access version 1.7 is already a great game and if the developers continue to build on it for a while, it could become a real classic. This an insider tip for space fans who mourn the days of Freelancer, Elite, or Wing Commander. Here it is worth getting back into the cockpit.

Affordable and good – Space fans should grab it

For the absolutely fair price of $19.50 or € you get, despite Early Access status, an almost complete game that can easily captivate you for dozens of hours. It already offers an extensive and varied feature list and is still being constantly developed. All in all, it’s a great game at a bargain price. I was very pleasantly surprised and very enthusiastic about what the small indie studio delivers here.

Spacebourne 2 Review – Rating

Summarizing all this, I get a very positive picture of Spacebourne 2. Extensive features, a lot of fun in the space battles, and a complex strategy-simulation game in the background offer a surprising depth of play that is very motivating. And all this comes at a good price.

For that, I’d like to give Spacebourne 2 in Early Access version 1.7 a basic rating of 80%. For an Early Access game, it runs surprisingly reliably, which I would like to reward with a 2% bonus, and for the really more than good price, you get a lot of gameplay, which earns an additional 5% bonus points.

This brings me to a current rating for Spacebourne 2 of 87%. A great game that every space fan should check out. And given the eagerness with which the developers are behind the game, I am very, very curious to see what new features will be added to the game in the coming months and whether Spacebourne 2 will be even better.

Outro

Do you like dogfights in space and conquest strategy across the universe? Or are spaceship shootouts and artificial voices not your thing? Feel free to write me your opinion in the comments of the YouTube Video or in the Community Discord.

More gaming news, game reviews, and guides can be found on the ZZ YouTube channel or here at https://zapzockt.de – thumbs up, subscribe, and share with friends won’t hurt and then I wish you a great day, ciao ciao, your Zap

Links and Sources

SpaceBourne 2 Steampage

SpaceBourne 2 Dev Website

DBK Games Twitter Page

SpaceBourne 2 Discord

SpaceBourne 2 Screenshot Gallery – Ingame Pictures (Part III)

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges