Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector Review - The Illusion of Choice
Few games released these days play quite like Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector or its predecessor, Citizen Sleeper. I have been playing video games for over thirty-five years now, and even the games I played as a child relied on the graphical technologies of the day, such as they were, to show the player the world they inhabited. While Starward Vector has multiple locations you can journey to, you are only depicted with the location as a whole. It doesn’t matter if you are visiting a shop to enquire about some fuel leads or trying to survive a rampaging piece of automated mining tech; you will only ever see the larger world area.
This is an intentional design choice, used because the main focus of Starward Vector is your interactions with the characters you encounter and the narrative journey you undertake alongside your crew. In the first game, your Sleeper was, for all intents and purposes, alone, and the game played akin to one of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books I used to read as a kid, where multiple paths lead to different endings, accessible from different points of the narrative. By comparison, the only real ending in Starward Vector always occurs at the same point. You may have made some different choices that result in differences in your crew, but no matter the path you take through the Starward Belt, your final destination is always the same.
Given that the game wants you to experience the narrative journey first and foremost, Starward Vector is a slow burn, filled with lots of exposition and conversations with NPCs that provide backstories, other information or just someone wanting to discuss how they feel. This is not a major issue, but as I reached the third act, there were times I wished I could skip some of these random conversations. On the flip side, in the early parts of the game, it can feel like too much information is being thrown at you without the time to absorb and understand it all fully.
This is most evident with the integration of the dice aspects of the game. With development rooted in the love of TTRPG games, all your actions and their consequences are determined by the roll of the die. The big change in Starward Vector comes with the application of negative effects failed rolls can have on your Sleeper and the increased difficulty these can bring. The majority of activities can result in a successful, neutral or negative result. While the stats of your character do play a factor in these, a majority of these results will be based on the number on the die used.
This is where Starward Vector can get overwhelming, because the negative results will damage the die used and cause stress to your own synthetic body. After three negative results, a die can break and need to be repaired, limiting your actions until you remedy the situation. Additionally, your body takes on stress that can introduce ‘glitches’ to your dice. Using a glitched die means you only have a 20% chance of a successful result, and until the third act, there is no way to remove these glitches. Given the timed nature of the contracts you undertake, limited by an event countdown or your store of supplies, there are times when you cannot avoid having to use these higher-risk dice when trying to complete an objective.
This can have a massive effect on player actions in the early part of the game, where time constraints combined with unlucky RNG results can really cause problems with progression. Combine this with an inability to create a save or reload your game manually, in what I believe is an attempt to avoid save scumming, and you have a real chance of ruining the player experience by inflicting them with a condition that cannot be remedied until late game. I would not be surprised if some players have been put off completing Starward Vector, having fallen afoul of these mechanics.
It is difficult to grade Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. There are moments where you feel you have control of how you want to play the game and what you want to do, but so too are there moments where you feel you are just following along on a predetermined story, where the choices don’t matter, and the free agency you have as the Sleeper is just an illusion. While I was lucky enough that I never suffered enough setbacks to ruin my playthrough, the imposition of penalties based on random results that the player cannot rectify also made me feel like my choices didn’t matter, and that, at the end of the day, the whole experience is reliant on luck to be successful.
Citizen Sleeper 2 was reviewed on PC with code kindly supplied by the publisher.
