This game would've been perfect, but I had a little problem at the end of the game where I couldn't see the screen because tears were streaming down my face.

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From the first moment it’s clear you’re chased by relentless enemies, in the inhospitable, bleak pile of ramshackle stations and struggling denizens that is The Belt. You may be distant from the Core Systems, torn by endless corporate wars, but you’re far from safe. Even more so for your being a Sleeper, an unnamed construct developed with servitude in mind, albeit one of the rare few that broke the drug-laced shackles of your masters. For that affront, you must die.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a tale of struggle against all odds, of survival and razor-edge compromises; in this aspect, the writing shines the most, also by emphasizing how things we may deem little are symbols of great hope in a place like The Belt. You’ll meet people willing to aid you, both companions that will venture with you and side characters; both are well-written, plausible and coherent in their responses, changing attitudes based on your actions and the events unfolding.

The narrative for each location is highly descriptive, sometimes a bit too much so, but that contributes majorly in giving you the right impression and knowledge of whatever place you’ll visit. Each place has its variety, not so much visually, but most of all contextually—space stations may look all the same, but it’s the people there and how they behave to make all the difference. There are a lot of mysteries in the Belt, all for you to uncover… if you can.

Despite all that, you’ll have the feeling a greater force, in a place that couldn’t be farther from any God, is protecting you in the most dire circumstances, a savior or an occurrence always ready to snatch you from oblivion’s grasp… unless you screw up really, really hard, but that’s on you.

You’ll soon acquire a ship, The Rig; not big enough to make it through the stars, but good enough to ferry you and your eventual crew around The Belt. You’ll have to manage fuel, supplies and even maintain it at times, all of which, of course, doesn’t come for free. You’ll have to find the Cryo, the local currency, to pay for it all, or obtain it in other ways, often through risky scavenging, shady deals and dangerous business. The scarcity is more felt at the beginning, where it shines most as a true struggle for survival, but becomes less demanding as you progress, despite it making little sense, since your circumstances only get more dire.

You’ll visit stations of all shapes and sizes: to get the lay of the land, you’ll have to use your Dice, a representation of your physical state and will to continue. Each passing day, you get six of them, rolled randomly, and you can use them in various interactions, such as exploring, doing odd jobs, repairing something, and a lot more. Depending on your character abilities, these dice may get a bonus or a malus, so better stick to the tasks that you’re more proficient at, and try to avoid what isn’t up your alley; there’s always a risk, and a negative outcome can deplete your energy quicker, making you starve in a world where food is a valued commodity, damage your dice, and even fail quests entirely or bar you from some interactions permanently, in the worst cases.

Your skills depend on your starting class, with one of the five different specializations being forever barred to you, making you completely inept at certain interactions. All the others can be upgraded with Skill Points, acquired by completing main and side quests. Each class also has a unique ability, only usable during Contracts, that can boost skill check outcomes for either you or your companions, remove Stress, which breaks your dice and leaves you with less chances to succeed, or other positive effects. These abilities also influence skill checks in dialogues, which instead of dice, use your raw skills as a baseline to dictate the outcome.

Normal quests often involve speaking to someone, doing favors, transporting goods, arranging deals. Some may be on a timer, some may not. The world doesn’t revolve around you and events beyond your control are always around the corner. There may be moments where you can take your leisure and keep accruing Cryo and resources, but those are few and far in-between. For most of the game, you’ll always have to be on the move, making efficient use of your time and your dice.

Contracts work differently. Some are found in the world, others given by your companions. Each of them is a high-risk situation where you’re tasked with interacting with something particularly dangerous, with limited supplies, accumulating stress, and often a time limit or another circumstance that can fail the contract entirely. These are the parts when strategy, efficiency and yes, even luck are most prominent. Choose what companions to assist you well, so that they can compensate for the abilities you lack. Choose when to wait another day to get better dice, or risk it all with low rolls to get the best outcome before time runs out. The risk-reward factor is very much present, and rarely will you have the time to get everything in one go: something usually needs to be left behind.

I'm a huge fan of the first game - I've completed it three or four times, have 23 hours in it, and I've enjoyed the variety of the flavor of the stories it told. Personal stories - characters you could get invested into and characters that stuck with you.

Unfortunately, the sequel chose to eschew personal touch in favor of expanded mechanics and expanded scope and I don't think the writing's style is quite suited for that. That isn't to say that it's bad - the quality is still there, but it's much harder to be invested in locations rather than people - especially locations as vague as these. The Eye worked because you spend the whole game there, enmeshed among its people. Here, you cycle through a dozen locations - each with barely any distinguishing characteristics and with a barrage of characters that come, say their lines, and exit the story as quickly as they came in.

Meanwhile, the crew of your ship - which, I think, is meant to be the main source of personal storytelling in this game - is extremely one-note. Some are more fleshed-out and have a role in the overarching story, but most of them follow a routine pattern of having an arc, that arc being quickly and roughly resolved and then fading into the background in a way that feels extremely abrupt. The overall effect of this is that aside from several characters, there's barely any tangible thread to hold onto in a meaningful way and that makes everything feel so much more muted and disconnected - even as this game's main threat to your character is meant to be much bigger and much more insidious than the first one's.

Now, this is mostly a story game, but there's definitely an emphasis on the mechanics being expanded for the sequel and, while there are more of them, they also feel fairly unfocused - just like the rest of the game. There are more variables and more penalties - you have to contend with more difficulties and more timers. However, just like before, all they add is stress on the first playthrough. Once you have a handle on how the game works, it's likely that you won't have any real difficulty completing it - at least, on base difficulty.

What is more vexing is the fact that some ideas feel at best unfinished and at worst squandered. Your crew has skills, but they are limited and there is no way to meaningfully alter or improve them which feels like a lost opportunity. Meanwhile, the item system has you gather five different kinds of scrap and other items but most of it is only useful for getting a bit of extra money which you probably won't need as long as you are frugal with what you get from the contracts. The number of times they played any role in the game's drives can be counted on one hand.

So, in the end, the main theme of this game is "bigger and better" and while it certainly does "bigger", I really miss the kind of stories the first game told and the atmosphere it had. I was very disappointed to find very little of that in the sequel. It feels like the game has been rebooted into something shinier, but much has been lost in transition - a real shame, considering how much I looked forward to this game.

I finished CS2 on day one—not because it was short (it took me around 12 hours to complete), but because it had its hooks in me the whole time. If you enjoyed CS1, you will love CS2—it's a traditional sequel in the sense of expanding on what was already good. The writing is great, the systems with the added crew missions are tense and fun, and the relationships are compelling and character designs are amazing. My only complaint is that I think the lack of VO is really holding this back from being more popular - even a single narrator would make it so much more enjoyable.

This is a solid sequel to an indie RPG released in 2022. It expands the gameplay and setting established by the original game, and provides greater agency in navigation, recruitment and missions.

CS1 was limited to a space station but CS2 takes place in a much larger game world: an asteroid belt. After the initial onboarding you're free to visit its various locations and pick up major and minor missions here and there. Upgrading the spaceship and completing major missions unlock access to extra locations. This nonlinearity in storytelling feels great. You can get involved in coups, trade deals, a manhunt, an advertising campaign, a three-way standoff over a corporate asset… At some point a smartly written love story quietly unfolds in the background. It feels like we're a small part of a greater living world, but a small part able to make choices, overcome hardship, turn the tables and make some friends on the way.

Scattered through the Belt is a roster of potential crewmates to discover and hire. They're very useful to complete the skillset of the protagonist during missions. If you've played the first game, you'll find out that some of its characters have found their way to the Starward Belt as companions or quest givers. They're not the same though, they've grown and changed in personality and outlook: the doubtful has found confidence, the embittered has turned to organized crime, the exiles may or may not settle down.

Before the story and companions, the daily routine of CS is its strangely fulfilling gameplay. Making the best of a bad situation, carefully allocating dice rolls between several tasks according to skills and threats, taking risks in a time-limited mission, being rewarded (or not) with a positive outcome plus some currency and upgrades: few other games manage to provide this satisfaction of a job well done.

All in all it's a well-polished experience. You don't need to have played the first game to enjoy the second, though it'll add some extra value.

By the way, here's something for newcomers and returning players who may need a refresher.


Locations
- The Core Systems: the center of the galaxy from which mankind spread, now presumably rich and highly populated. Ruled by corporations and the Core System law, which bans sentient AI but allows sleeper labor.
- The Helion System: the solar system where CS1 and CS2 take place. Its sun is named H1. Orbiting around it are the planets Stoker, Cinder and Ember as well as their moons, two clusters of asteroids named the Sunward Belt and the Starward Belt, and the space station Erlin's Eye.

Corporations
- Conway Extractions: a major corp specialized in resource extraction. Conway builds and uses a fleet of extraction and security drones, piloted from different star systems with top proprietary tech. Its armed drones are used in its war against SenetStat for the control of the inner Helion System.
- Cybele: a minor corp specialized in terraforming technology
- Essen-Arp: a major corp specialized in production and operation of Sleepers. Sleepers are synthetic bodies run by an emulated human mind scanned from an actual human being, but considered as non-human assets by the Core System law. They require stabilizer drugs produced by Essen-Arp to prevent planned obsolescence. Essen-Arp employs armed sleepers to capture escaped sleepers.
- NEOVEND: a minor corp specialized in providing paid services to colonists of the Helion System
- SenetStat: a major corp specialized in data analysis. SenetStat has purchased the ownership of the Helion System from Solheim, and employs mercenaries to wage war against Conway for the control of the system.
- Solheim: a former major corp which has collapsed before the events of CS1 and CS2. It led the colonization of the Helion System and the exploitation of its resources, and built a lot of stations and outposts which are now abandoned or repurposed, such as Æ1, the space station where CS1 is set (renamed Erlin's Eye after the fall of Solheim).
- XPR: a minor service corporation which provides logistical support to their corporate clients, such as refueling stations. It lost its main business partner when Solheim collapsed.

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With the first game being one of my alltime favorite games, period, my expectations for Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector were high when going into it.

I can happily say most of my expectations were met, some were pleasantly exceeded, and only a few minor grievances cropped up in my first complete 10 hour playthrough.

If you liked the first game, it's an easy recommend.
If you didn't play the first game, you don't need to have played it to enjoy this, though playing the first elevates the enjoyment of this tenfold (and is also just a great game in its own right).
If you didn't like the first game, this isn't for you since it's merely expanding on the formula of what the first did well.
8.9/10

- The writing in the first game was phenomenal, and in my experience some writers can lose that edge when making further iterations if they're not careful. Thankfully, Gareth has improved on their writing skills, and it shows wonderfully in this sequel. More characters in more varied circumstances all feeling unique and intriguing is something to be proud of. There was never an immersion break, nothing that felt like it was out of character when someone made a decision or said something.

- The new and adjusted gameplay systems feel familiar yet distinct simultaneously. I enjoy the risk/reward and the touch more complexity added into the gameplay loop in this iteration. Contracts and the Glitched Die system feel great overall, if in need of some minor tuning and balancing. It's not too cumbersome to feel like a drag, and not too simple to where it feels tacked on or anything like that (with one minor exception I'll get to later). A phenomenal iteration of the dice system.

- Where Citizen Sleeper 1 was an introduction to this universe, I'm glad this sequel expanded on it without betraying the potential choices the player made in the first game. By design, your Sleeper in CS1 never made any grand, system-spanning decisions but at the same time you felt impactful in the lives of the characters you involved yourself with on the Eye. Without spoiling directly, seeing where some of those characters are now, knowing what potential choices and endings you could have gotten in the first game, I never felt that a 'canon' I had chosen as 'my' ending had been betrayed in the first game, nor did I see that any of the endings got decanonized in any way here in the 2nd game, which pleases me greatly. It was a concern of mine before getting into this; that either there'd be zero callbacks, or there'd be confirmation of one ending that decanonizes or makes other endings feel illegitimate.

- In tandem with the writing, the art has had a noticeable quality uplift overall too. Not that the first's was bad by any stretch, but the art style feels more refined and explored in this iteration in a way I appreciate deeply, and aids even further in immersing you in the universe that's painted for you.

- The soundtrack is phenomenal as the first's was. Nothing that completely wow'd me so to speak, but nothing that was jarring or felt out of place. It simply feels like a very solid expansion of the soundtrack established for the first game, and I'm happy to have more to add to my playlists.

- The Belt you can travel in is well paced and balanced overall, and feels *just* big enough for what the narrative needs. This is not an exploration game, and while you can travel to different locales, still feels closer-knit in many ways like The Eye was. I don't consider this necessarily a good or bad thing, more something that didn't feel great or terrible. Fun set piece and gameplay to work with, but not wowing.

- Each locale can feel sorta samey and lack a sense of variety at points in the playthrough that left me wanting just a bit more sometimes, in terms of gameplay. Most will have a place to refuel, resupply, earn chits, and earn a specific resource. It can lightly detach the urgency of some quests when I need to go back to a location I'd just visited for the sake of getting enough of a resource to meet a threshold for a quest. This is ultimately a nitpick, but one I feel worth mentioning. The moment a dialogue and text tree ends and you've met progressed as much of your quests at a location, sometimes locations can feel a bit reduced to simply gameplay spots, which is a bit dull at moments.

- Where Citizen Sleeper 1 had multiple paths that could lead to very different endings, Citizen Sleeper 2 has many potential paths to explore that ultimately end up to a single ending point (as far as I can tell). This ending and who is involved or present can be altered widely by your choices of course, but it's worth mentioning given how the first one, narratively, is distinct in that way. I've enjoyed both, and feel a replay would bear a much different story depending on what choices I make, but I know ending up in roughly the same spot at the end of every playthrough can end up feeling a bit "too on the rails" for some, so it's worth mentioning if you were expecting a multiple endings experience like the first game.

- I like the crew system for its narrative opportunities and further player choice in terms of who they want to bring along. Being able to pick specific characters to interact with on journeys and get closer to them that way felt organic and appreciated. However, the "eh" part comes in with the gameplay, which is the ONLY 'tacked on' feeling aspect to the gameplay in my opinion. While it's nice to have companions or crewmates have their own dice to roll on Contracts, it falls a bit flat in terms of expandability. I'd have liked to see even a simple form of leveling up depending on how much you bring a certain crewmate along, maybe being able to make their chances of better dice higher or being able to put +'s onto certain skills. Nothing to the point our Sleeper can, but something to where I can feel my relationship with that character grows outside of the dialogue and has an impact on the gameplay. Hopefully something a future update can expand on lightly, who knows.

- Philosophically, the writing makes some choices I felt a bit disagreeable to, or felt pressured against making. There were a few instances I was told how my Sleeper was feeling without being given a choice, and I didn't much agree in that that'd be how *I* would respond or feel to the situation. Additionally, there are several moments where you get the "I completely agree" or the "I'm sorta iffy on it but it will happen anyway" options with no true opposite option. It's rare and more-so in teh later game, but these moments for me personally did pull me out of the experience a bit. Obviously, with one writer needing to account for any possible choice a player could make, there are limits to what can be implemented. But, without spoiling, introducing higher stake or existential topics only for there to *really* be one ultimate answer to the encounter felt a bit too on the rails for me at times.
Again, to not spoil, it's things I think most in a general audience would agree with and not take issue with, and so is an extreme nitpick in the grand scheme, but something I felt worth mentioning in case others feel the same after a playthrough.

Saying I enjoyed this game on a first playthrough is an understatement. It's another wonderful narrative RPG that is in my top 10 games that have impacted me personally. The overarching narrative, the characters, the universe it's set in, all are incredibly enjoyable and overall immersive to a point I felt moved at the end of my first playthrough. I will no doubt be playing more to achievement hunt and experience different dialogue options I missed. It isn't perfect, but it's an unforgettable experience regardless, one I hope many many people get to enjoy.

The overall feeling of the game is quite different from the first one, while in Citizen Sleeper 1 there's that feeling of loneliness and not truly trusting anyone, here it's subverted as you already on the run with Seraphin, a pilot and your friend.

The game takes place in the Starward Belt, the outer asteroid belt of the Helios System. There you'll travel between settlements, taking some contracts and doing some jobs to earn enough money so you can keep your ship fueled and with enough supplies to finish the contracts, though like the previous game once you reach a certain point, money and resources will not be a problem anymore.

The NPC art is still top notch and the music doesn't gets in the way but sets the mood for the whole game duration. A bit of spoilers but if you played Citizen Sleeper 1 you will recognize some NPCs from the first game as well some events are mentioned.

It's a good successor. I don't feel as strongly about it as I did towards the first game, but I'm not sure why. Maybe the story of the first one was more compelling? Or it felt like the characters got a more cohesive arc, I guess. The gameplay was improved in this one, but as a result it obviously feels more "gamified," and I'm not sure it was for the best.

All that aside, it's a great game, but make sure you play the first one too.

This game has the JUICE. I thought the first game had the juice, but this one truly has the JUICE. If you enjoyed the first game, please play this one. It's better in every single way.

It's hard for me to sum up the citizen sleeper series, it's a narrative driven series which play almost like visual novel games but with some resources management added in but also that unlike in visual novel, the way that you progress through the game in CS games is by throwing dice and therefore RNG and the dice itself can be thought as included to the resources management that I mentioned in the above.

Big changes they made with CS2 are :

1. adding ability to have crews to accompany you throughout the game helping you to progress through the game.

2. a stress mechanic that can lead to your dice broken or in the case of your crew they would literally stopped working. Also the objectives themselves can also have "stress" that can lead you and your crew failing the task, falling the quest and therefore requiring you to pursue other means to progress.

3. A limited hub style open world where you can explore various places, mostly stations and space derelicts.

I find those changes are mixed bag, they can feel good and frustrating at the same time especially given that you're still literally depending on RNG to progress in the game.

Now, what I personally find disappointing is in the narration of this game compared to the first game, I don't really know why but somehow to me I find the sequel has weaker narration, and here I don't mean the story telling per se but rather I feel the way I and my character progress through the story in this game especially toward the end goal is more linear, restricted and limited compared to the first game despite this game is supposed to be more open with the new mechanics I mentioned previously.

Audio and visual wise it's more of the same with the first game, these games have ice character arts in cartoon style to communicate some personality but mostly it's just a text based game with low poly background rendered to your screen, nothing has changed... Even a potato PC should be able to play this game full stop.

That's my summary with this game, it's somewhat a must play for a fan of the first game but at the same time it's also weaker or slightly worse than the first game in one aspect that should make or break this kind of games : the narrative element.