Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review — A stellar change of formula

Citizen Sleeper was a masterclass in atmosphere and tone, creating a beautiful, fragile environment for our main character to explore and face the joys and hardships of life in outer space. For something so out of reach for the player, it’s an incredibly grounded experience packaged with riveting dialogue and addicting gameplay. Whilst this game was quiet in its challenge and was often quite forgiving, Citizen Sleeper 2 amplifies the stress of survival by 100. In both instalments, you play as a Sleeper, a human’s mind that has been placed into a robot vessel to be controlled. Citizen Sleeper balances the feeling of isolation and community extremely well, the troubles you often face being the idea of your existence and helping the people around you.

As I said previously, this game feels very different compared to its predecessor, but in a fresh and exciting way. You and your partner, Serafin, find yourselves on the run from your oppressive boss/owner. After a hasty encounter that leaves you malfunctioning, you find that you’ve forgotten everything and your only mission is to escape from him before he can find you. Citizen Sleeper 2 doesn’t wait around to chuck you straight into chaos, and the desperation that our fugitives feel. It’s a capturing beginning and strongly maintains that tone for the rest of its playtime.

This time around, you’re not just sticking to one main giant hub, you’re free to explore the ‘belt’ , a cluster of stations that you can hop between however many times you like. Each has their own locale, people to meet and contracts to fulfil. This does sacrifice the personal bonds you build up throughout Citizen Sleeper 1 due to its less intimate setting, but the themes of Citizen Sleeper perfectly fit the fleeting friendships you create whilst on the run. You still have a crew with recurring characters, who are all unique and fun to get to know.

This time you have a partner in crime, Serafin, who is just as entangled in your problems as you are in his. Each location uses fuel to get to which costs cryo to buy, and later on you will encounter obstacles you can’t pass unless you obtain a certain item. Overall, it’s exciting to discover the places this game has on offer, with their own troubles and communities to get to know. However, be careful as you’re on the run, every location you reach there will be a counter that counts down the number of cycles until Laine (your former boss) finds you, each time you travel it pushes it back by three cycles so you can’t hang around grinding for money for too long.

Citizen Sleeper 2 carries on the same gameplay mechanics, its RNG dice-roll system is welcomingly back where every action you want to make - from earning money on odd jobs to investigating markets - requires the player to pass a check to successfully execute the action which then fills a gauge. There are three possible outcomes, negative, neutral, and positive. Negative not only means you fail, but you probably hurt yourself in the attempt. Neutral means you succeeded, but it’s nothing special.

Finally, a positive outcome means you passed with flying colors, and may even get a bit of a bonus. At the beginning of the game, you can pick one of three builds that present you with different stats. The Mechanic makes it so you’re efficient in ‘engineer’ checks but gives you a disadvantage in engage skill checks and the Extractor in endure checks, for example. Each check is separated into requiring these stats: engineer, interface, endure, intuit, and engage. Depending on your stats, you can make it so it's near impossible to succeed at certain tasks. At the start of each day, you are given 5 randomised dice from the numbers 1-6, with the higher the score giving you a better chance. 6 is basically a guaranteed positive outcome, while 1 is almost certainly a failure. Your stats will add or subtract from these numbers, so if you’re proficient in interface, with a +2, you can insert a 4 die to make it a 6. This is all pretty basic stuff for someone who has played the first game, but the developers take this comfort and throw it into the stratosphere with some new and daunting features to its dice.

The first change is that dice can now break according to your stress meter. Each die has three bars of health and when they break they must be repaired in a workshop aboard your ship, costing expensive materials. To frustratingly add to this is the new glitched dice. If you choose the cheaper option to fix your dice, i.e. using scrap components, there’s a risk that they can become glitched, fixing your dice at a 80% negative, 20% positive ratio. 9 times out of ten this is a nightmare and I tried to avoid using them in any risky scenario. The only time they can really be utilized is against a skill check that you’re automatically disadvantaged at, but even a 20% positive chance is more than you’ll ever get from normal dice. If you don’t use glitched dice, they’ll continue to pop up and fill segments of the Glitch meter. Once this meter is filled, your character will receive a permanent glitch. To avoid them you can use higher quality components to fix them in the first place, but these are far and few between, mostly gained from completing contracts.

Speaking of contracts, boy are they an unbelievably cool new addition to Citizen Sleeper’s formula. They act as main missions where you take yourself and two crew members on expeditions to abandoned space stations, floating debris to extract materials, or to find hidden secrets out in space. Each crew member has a particular stat or two they’re good at which can combine with yours or cover your weaknesses to tear through mini challenges like cracking the code to opening a door or moving debris out of the way. Each contract takes a few cycles to complete and has you completing sets of checks in order to accomplish your goal. This can turn stressful really fast as your crew are only given 2 dice at the start of each cycle, and it’s a bit of a struggle if they’re only ones and twos. Contracts also use supplies to feed your crew, you can carry 5 at a time so if your contract is taking you more than 5 cycles to complete, you may need to approach it from a different angle. After you run out of supplies it rapidly increases your stress meter, and if it reaches max capacity, you are highly susceptible to your dice breaking, leaving you without much action. Each contract has one of two outcomes, you succeed or fail (duh) but both have consequences on the story and characters that are attached to them, so they aren’t to be treated lightly. In the first main contract you can immediately lose one optional crew member, which is a huge bummer.

Mentioned a few times before is our final new main gameplay mechanic: the stress system. As you can already probably tell, it affects most of your time playing Citizen Sleeper 2. Above the dice you are given at the start of each cycle is a stress meter, for every ‘stressful’ action you do, like getting a negative outcome in a dice roll or failing to manage a random event in a contract, you gain one stress. Managing your stress through eating and recovering is vital otherwise you risk your entire playthrough. In my first run I didn’t really know what I was doing and in a later game contract I ended up reaching max stress and breaking most of my dice. This situation is incredibly hard to shake if you haven’t got the funds/material to fix your dice as you find yourself stuck in a loop where your high stress rapidly deteriorates your recently fixed dice. So my biggest word of advice is to make sure you are keeping an eye on both dice and stress! If you end up breaking all of your dice, you actually die. In storyteller difficulty this function is removed, but in normal if you die you have an 80% chance of dying permanently and a 20% chance of recovering with three dice. In hard difficulty it acts as a perma-death which is a stress I didn’t even entertain playing.

This difficulty curve in learning and adapting to these completely new gameplay mechanics can be quite rough in your initial playthrough and for me, getting 7 hours in I felt fairly defeated when I was cornered and was forced to restart my playthrough. This may just be me being too frantic in my playstyle, but looking at other player’s experiences, I may not be the only one. On the other hand, how can I fault all these features when they’re so innovative and appropriate for this game! I was absolutely in love with uncovering everything Citizen Sleeper 2 had to offer and my expectations were blown out of proportion. I would have been happy with another Citizen Sleeper, but with a new lick of paint, but they took their stellar concept and flipped it to make something so different, yet still so them.

A final note on the platform differences. We played the game on both PC and Switch, and it’s clear the game was designed around the use of a mouse. It’s not impossible to play with a gamepad, but on Switch occasionally the cursor would disappear completely, essentially soft-locking the entire game. Additionally, the low resolution of Nintendo’s aging console isn’t doing this game any favors. The minimalist visuals look great, especially on an OLED screen, but the text can be so small in portable mod as to be almost unreadable. It's frustrating, because impeccable writing is essentially what you’re here for. Even so, if this is the only way you can play Citizen Sleeper 2, you owe it to yourself to experience it.