Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector masterfully blends existential storytelling, tabletop-inspired mechanics, and community-driven narratives into a thought-provoking sci-fi RPG experience.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, developed by Jump Over The Age and published by Fellow Traveller, is a logical progression of its first, taking its strengths and enhancing them with new additions that make its experience even deeper and richer. As a player who was drawn in by its first game’s introspective analysis of individuality and community, I couldn’t help but wonder how its follow-up will expand on these themes.
Just like the first game, Starward Vector doesn’t disappoint. It keeps the key elements that made its predecessor so memorable—its philosophic nuance, relational focus, and tabletop-inspired mechanics—while introducing new ones that make its gameplay even brighter and more engrossing.
It is not, however, perfect, and sections of the game can become slow and repetitive. Despite its minor weaknesses, Starward Vector is an engrossing game that carries its predecessor’s high level of emotion and intelligence.
One of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s most powerful strengths is its dedication to portraying an emotionally powerful human story through a nonhuman viewpoint character. You’re a Sleeper, an android whose consciousness is a simulation of a life in the past. That premise begs immediate questions about identity, free will, and what it is to “be” alive.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector doesn’t shirk at these big questions, weaving them both into its narrative and its gameplay. Your Sleeper is torn between its mechanical form and its humanity at all times, and that tension is represented in your in-game choices. Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s narrative is full of philosophic and existential tension, and it’s apparent that a lot of care and consideration went into exploring these subjects.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s dialogue is sharp and frequently cutting, particularly when it touches on personhood and how humans try to claim your Sleeper for themselves. Those sections are uncomfortable and challenging, and add a level of depth to the narrative and make you care about its conclusion.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, much like the first, borrows a lot of its gameplay from tabletop RPGs. If you’re looking for a traditional RPG, then you’re in for a disappointment. It’s not a title in which you will spend an eternity fiddling with your statistics and grinding for experience points. Instead, it’s about rolling your dice, managing your resources, and getting the most out of your finite tools at your disposal.
Your Sleeper is a three-classed character, and each one of them has its strengths and weaknesses. I chose to go with the Extractor, a character best at rough, physical work and hostile environments but not at complex, delicate operations.
Having a class system in use brings a level of complexity to the title in that you must make careful decisions about best utilizing your finite roles in a problem-solving scenario.
Because of the tabletop-inspired title, you have little control over the success of these rolls, and sometimes, it can become infuriating, but it helps build tension and unpredictability in a big way. You’re always balancing out the odds and consequences of each move, and therefore, each success feels earned, and each failure feels that much worse.
One of the largest additions to Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is crew missions. These multi-step jobs involve getting a group of professionals with a range of skills and working together to complete objectives.
For example, you must break through the derelict spacecraft’s hull with a hammer in order for a hardware expert ally to gain access to the mainframe and for your hacker to position himself to grab information.
These missions are longer and more involved than in the first game and involve careful planning and management of your assets. Materials for each cycle must be bought, and when your stores run out, events can spiral out of your hands in seconds. Adding crew members introduces a new level of planning to the game in that you must combine and switch out their skills in an attempt to cover your weaknesses.
The new push actions in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, such as the Extractor’s Rally, which buffs your dice at a cost to overall crew stress, introduce a new level of planning to these missions.
These sections were hands down my favorite and most engrossing part of the game, and I enjoyed them for two big reasons: I enjoyed having a challenge and having to adapt to changing events in a timely manner.
Another big feature added in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is its new stress system, a new system in place of the first game’s condition system. As you botch a check or have a poor encounter, your stress builds, and your penalty to your dice rolls with it, too. Once your stress meter is over halfway, any low-scoring dice will suffer, and when a dice takes too much damage, it will break and become inoperative until repaired.
This mechanism brings danger and urgency to Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, both of which were lacking in the first version. There have been times when I’d have a quest ongoing, down a few dice, and testing my remaining ones’ durability.
These encounters were infuriating but added tension to the game, making it even more immersive. The stress system makes you become more careful and calculated, for one poor roll could have lasting repercussions.
Community building was a strong theme in Citizen Sleeper, and it continues in Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. Practically every objective is about forming alliances and developing relationships with others, and the plot of the game is grounded firmly in solidarity and group activity.
The narrative takes place in many different systems, and when traveling between locations, you will encounter various characters, each with an issue and motivation of their own. The game’s message about community, its strength, and its role in creating change feels particularly timely in today’s society. It reminds us that, even in the face of enormous obstacles, solidarity and group will break through both budget and class walls.
The characters that you will run into during your journey are fairly believable, even when not particularly deep and complex. Most of them follow general archetypes, such as spunky go-getter, diligent caregiver, and a pleasure to chat with, and don’t necessarily have any real twists and turns in store for them.
That being said, the game keeps its intrigue apace through its use of new characters and new scenarios at a constant clip, and its use of characters that cannot join your crew but have a role in your journey keeps them in and out at a timely pace.
Visually, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector employs a similar simple, near-abstraction to the first title. The artwork is functional and unobtrusive, with an eye towards conveying a sense of location and not drowning in detail. The visual novel-inspired format of the game is text-heavy, and it won’t appeal to everyone, but it creates a level of narrative complexity and nuance that a direction with a lot of action could not have achieved.
Writing is the high point in terms of the show, and it’s clear a lot of care was taken in developing the scenario and dialogue of Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector. The game succeeds in creating complex webs of philosophical and existential tension, and it isn’t afraid to tackle gargantuan subjects.
Where the game fails, however, is in its application of physical confrontations. Shootout and high-speed car chases lack the impact of the more introspective parts and can become unengaging in comparison.
In a nutshell, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a great follow-up to the first title, and it’s clear a lot of work and refinement went into developing and honing the experience. The new crew assignments, stress system, and community development add nuance and complexity to the gameplay, and the plot continues to explore big, thinking, person’s topics such as identity, freedom, and unity. While sometimes slow and text-heavy, these elements contribute to its uniqueness.
