Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector review – "A smart sequel that takes everything that worked from the stellar original and expands"

Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is, in some ways, just Citizen Sleeper But More. No longer are you stuck exploring a single station; now, a lengthy stretch of space with stations, asteroids, and more to explore is your playground. And this time, you're not alone as a crew you can build up over time is along for the ride – and what a ride it is. More to do, more people to meet, and more existential questions to contemplate. Wake up, Sleeper; there's no time to waste.

The premise of Citizen Sleeper 2 is, broadly speaking, similar to the original: you are a Sleeper, an emulated consciousness attached to a deliberately decaying mechanical body owned by a massive corporation. But whereas the first game saw your Sleeper seeking to deliberately cut those ties and all the ways that might play out in a single place, Citizen Sleeper 2 is largely about what happens when an individual attempts to assert ownership over your entire being and the subsequent desperate struggle to escape across an entire sector of space.

Second verse

All the mechanics of the original are here, and, as before, you generate a row of dice each turn, which Citizen Sleeper 2 refers to as a "cycle." Broadly, those individual dice serve as actions that you can use to do all sorts of tasks ranging from the likes of foraging for mushrooms or trying to gather intel at the docks, depending on where you are. Spending a higher numbered die, combined with your Sleeper's unique stats affect your chance of success and potential resulting consequences. Do you ensure a "Safe" ranking before beginning, or risk the potential for "Danger" to chase a big reward? The dice rolls you're saddled with may have you weighing up these decisions for a while.

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Each class, like Operator, comes with a specific ability (in my case as an Operator, the ability to reroll a certain number of dice) that has a rudimentary progression attached that you can upgrade over time by completing Drives, which are functionally quests that range in complexity from taking someone somewhere to fetching items to upending the corporate hierarchy of a local water company. Instead of upgrading the class ability, you can always dump these points into your skills like Endure or Engage in order to permanently have better rolls on those actions. Yet, each class has one stat that's impossible to improve or even have at all, making those rolls inherently more difficult.

Despite all of this mechanical setup, Citizen Sleeper 2 feels largely rooted in modern tabletop narrative design: the story is told and facilitated through dice rolls, pure and simple. Success, failure, and everything in between is a combination of chance and forethought with impacts ranging from devastating to milquetoast. Maybe you simply failed to rest properly and didn't remove any stress, or maybe you broke some fundamental part of a ship and now your enemies are that much closer to finding you, and it's more unstable than ever.

You can be as prepared as possible and still one bad roll will land you on the completely opposite shore of where you meant to go. With traditional tabletop role-playing games, this is where improv and quick thinking might come into play. In Citizen Sleeper 2, all of this is written and predetermined – emulated, if you will, like your own character's consciousness. It works more often than not, but as something of a tabletop RPG head myself, there is also always a small inkling in the back of my mind that any perceived depth is an optical illusion expertly crafted in concert with the developer. Increasingly throughout my 13-hour playthrough, I wondered if that is the point.

Safely risky

Despite the fact that you are ostensibly running away from a sociopathic owner for the vast majority of Citizen Sleeper 2, it never quite felt like there was ever any real danger or bite behind my rolls. Maybe my experience with the original honed my skills to a razor edge, but the standard difficulty setting ultimately meant that I rarely, if ever, had to pass up on an accomplishment or opportunity. With my own dice rolls, two each for crew members on a mission per cycle, and just a little bit of forethought put into who was coming along and where I was focused next, I only ever really felt pressured on one or two occasions. The only one where I didn't completely succeed in the end had a positive outcome regardless.

But perhaps I really am some kind of godly strategizer instead. Citizen Sleeper 2 regularly ups the ante, so to speak, by introducing new complexities and resources to manage. Sure, you've got enough fuel and supplies to keep your people fed, but what about data you can only gather at an abandoned, out-of-the-way outpost? And how do you deal with a stowaway that needs to be regularly fed or your careful supply management can be ruined? For me, personally, this was just a larger-than-typical spreadsheet to manage, but I can imagine others getting lost in the specifics.

Citizen Sleeper 2 is at its very best when all of these mechanisms come together to form narrative arcs that feel both natural and inevitable. Inevitable, in part, because of the game's robust autosaving, which all but prevents manipulating saves to redo difficult challenges. You either do, or you don't and very occasionally somewhere in between. Much of the game was easy for me and only grew easier as I completed Drives like tracking down my pilot/cohort Serafin's sister or seeking out a particular kind of engine with troublesome freelancer Yu-Jin.

But sometimes you're faced with a difficult decision that only happens in the first place because you avoided, say, physically mining due to lacking the Endure skill and you're out of supplies thanks to a mission suddenly dropping in your lap without time to prep, which means your entire crew – including yourself – is building up stress which can knock said crew out of the mission and ultimately remove dice from your pool of actions. Sometimes that means you have to pick between tasks that both seem vital; between the wants of crew members the cold reality of space. It's a friction that can create palpable tension, and it all ultimately stemming from a handful of dice, and how you try to make your own luck, is where Citizen Sleeper 2 shines.

Who are you to decide? A Sleeper, whose entire existence and personhood remains in question throughout. Someone muddling through, who in the face of authority and capitalism and oligarchy can instead choose hope and see others do the same. Citizen Sleeper 2's space and stations can be cold and cruel, and the vast corporate machine never ceases its churning, but there is a certain romance to everyone moving forward with their lives and loves – often in spite of all this – and it is hard to not be charmed.