Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector Review

In challenging times on the Belt, the difference between success and failure often comes down to a roll of the dice.

The Setup for Citizen Sleeper 2

Citizen Sleeper 2 is a dice-based RPG that begins much like the first game did; with the playable character running from an oppressor.

In this game, you play once again as a Sleeper. Sleepers in the world created by Jump Over The Age are emulated humans. Frames, as they are colloquially called, house a copy of a human consciousness stripped of most of their memories. Only phantoms of their humanity remain.

However, instead of dealing with the faceless threat of your corporate owners, Essen-Arp, this game’s villain has a face and a very clear motive. Laine, who leads a gang in the Starward Belt, owns you. After a daring escape with your companion Serafin, you find yourself at rock bottom. You’ve got a malfunctioning body, a bounty on your head and a stolen ship called The Rig that barely works. It’s here where you need to take on jobs to claw your way out of the hole that you have been put into.

Citizen Sleeper 2’s Core Gameplay

These jobs will connect you to other friendly faces in the Belt who can help you with your main quest. Much like the first game, you will be presented with dice that you can put to work every turn. You can use them to complete jobs that open up other locations and plot-lines. You can also use them to collect resources like money, supplies to feed your crew on missions and fuel for your ship. Your dice rolls can provide either a positive, neutral or negative outcome. Rewards come down to the risk level of the specific tasks that you’re trying to complete combined with your particular set of skills. For low-risk tasks, you may win or lose a little money or energy. For high-risk tasks that are outside of your wheelhouse, you can find yourself with much more dire consequences.

Your biggest adversary in this game is time. Many of the tasks and missions that you will push yourself to complete are time-limited and will resolve with or without you having completed them.

Citizen Sleeper as a series focuses on continuing to move the story forward much like a good dungeon master would in a tabletop session. In practice, this means that instead of relying on failure states, some outcomes are just better than others.

However, there is one permanent way that your character is marked by failure; you can cause yourself damage that you carry with you in the form of glitches. Instead of dealing with a constantly worsening condition bar like you did in the original game, you will instead have to deal with the condition of each of your dice degrading over time. Degradation is accelerated based on your stress levels. If all of your dice break without being repaired, you will be given a soft game over through a glitch. These glitches will cause you to roll glitched dice which will give you a negative outcome 80% of the time.

This Game is Way Bigger

The team over at Jump Over the Age have made numerous, major additions to the experience here that make this game feel so much grander than the first.

First, you will be able to travel to different planets. The long and narrow space station of the Erlin’s Eye from the first game is gone. Instead of struggling occasionally to find exactly what action you should take next, this game splits up the world into a series of smaller planets that you travel between to complete your in-game missions (called Drives). Second, instead of meeting folks who will remain mostly in one place on the map and only assist you with specific Drives, you collect a misfit crew as you make your way through this one. Each of these characters has their style of communication, their wants and desires and some of them aren’t even the most trustworthy companions that you could bring along with you. Finally, you will have the ability to go on Contract Missions at several points, where for the first time you will be able to bring up to two of your crew mates with you. These crew mates will be able to roll their own set of two dice and have skills that can match or complement your own.

Contract Missions

These Contract Missions are where the game really shines for me. You will usually have a very specific objective while being faced with caution every turn. One example: you are asked to collect a resource from a derelict vessel. You’re asked to do this while trying to avoid making too much noise that will catch the attention of patrolling drones. If you have a few negative outcomes with your rolls, you can expect that peril will erupt in the middle of the mission. A few more negative outcomes may lead to failing the mission completely.

I was on edge for quite a few of these missions; at the standard difficulty, I found that these were tuned just right to provide a little stress most of the time. At least twice, my success or failure came down to one low probability roll. On both occasions, my neutral outcome led to beating the mission and jumping for joy at the top of my lungs. Being on the edge of my seat is a rarity to be treasured in games these days, so I appreciated it.

Writing

Citizen Sleeper 2 is exceedingly difficult to write about because the words that I put to virtual paper pale in comparison to the rich tapestry that’s woven into the experience. Having just played through the first game in preparation for this review, the writing impossibly feels like a step up here. Not only is there just a lot more of it in the game, but I found that it gave more space for describing feeling – which is such an oxymoron given you’re playing as an emulation of a human being. With that space to give your crew mates more character, every one of them felt distinct. But it’s not just the character interactions, but the world-building as well.

On far too many occasions, I found myself sitting and taking photos of Gareth Damian Martin’s words, in awe of specific turns of phrase. Despite being oppressed by the cruelty of gig work in space constantly, the story somehow always managed to provide a semblance of hope or warmth to me.

Music and Art

This game comes together as a wildly complete package thanks in part to its presentation.

The music by Amos Roddy fits the experience so well and it’s hard to imagine the world of Citizen Sleeper without his ambient compositions. Some of the songs focused on plodding synths that matched the emptiness of space while some of the tracks felt like they had a heartbeat through them that matched the pace of the work that the labourers of the Belt were surely carrying out. Much like the first game, the music tracks always seem to meet the moment mood-wise. That comes down to the sheer number of tracks on the OST but I have always wondered if specific in-game conditions made certain tracks play at the right moment.

The UI in the game works well and wraps itself around the stellar art from Guillaume Singelin. The neo-noir overworld is principally filled with simple 3D models. They always feel so clean and corporate when placed behind the high-contrast cel-shaded characters that bring life to a world mostly devoid of oxygen.

The Belt Can Be Harsh

My only tiny complaint with this game is that it could have used a few more tutorials. Each of the game’s major elements is explained with a single large pop-up window near the start of the game, but the intricacies of those systems are for you to discover. I imagine that throwing you in was a deliberate choice, but I found myself not understanding the interplay between some systems like my push ability and stress, for instance. I also found myself on at least one occasion being”stuck” in a contract mission. Through my very particular combination of glitches and broken dice, I found myself needing to choose between leaving a mission without completing it or sitting through a large number of rolls with a single glitched dice. This will likely be a problem for few players, but I thought I would call it out here.

Final Verdict on Citizen Sleeper 2

There will not be ten games better than Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector in 2025.

It’s a generational RPG built on an already solid foundation. Through its cocktail of pointed writing, high-stakes gameplay, great presentation and stellar music, I had very little to complain about during my 12-hour playthrough of this game.

I just wonder how many cycles it will be until I reboot and have another go.

Final Score: 9.5/10

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The game’s publisher provided a copy of the game for this feature. Reviewed on PC.

If you’re looking for more of my thoughts about this one, check out this one-hour video that I put together with Adam Gumbert about the game.

Looking to spend more time in space? Look no further than Mouthwashing.