Citizen Sleeper 2 review: Rolling with disadvantage

Relative to heavyweight hits like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Diablo 4, Citizen Sleeper was the little RPG that could. It offered up a fresh science fiction setting and unique dice-based mechanics that made for a more-ish adventure elevated by fantastic writing, stylish art and unusual twists on the usual tropes. I liked it so much that it ended up on our list of the best games of 2022. 

Arriving just shy of three years on from then, Jump Over The Age’s sci-fi sequel doesn’t feel quite as well-rounded or polished as its predecessor, but Starward Vector mostly makes the right moves when it comes to complicating, evolving and building on what came before it.

The setup here is a little less slice-of-life and a little more space opera. Rather than be on the run from your corporate owners a la Blade Runner, Starward Vector sees you staying one step ahead of a megalomaniac mastermind-slash-abuser determined to become your captor once more. Up to a certain point, the clock is always ticking down between you and this adversary and that inherent tension drives not only the in-game action but also the choices you end up making.

As with the first game, the adventure is divided into cycles. Each of these turns begin with you rolling a handful of dice. These can then be spent on various tasks in the world. Some actions advance story threads, others generate resources like money, fuel or supplies. Each task also aligns to a certain skill, with your sleeper’s strengths and weaknesses determined by the character class you choose at the outset. 

Critically, just because you spend a die dealing with a given thing doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. The value on the die you’re spending (and the relevance of your skills) will shape your chances of getting the best outcome, but it’s rarely a sure bet. 

So far, so familiar. Although Citizen Sleeper 2 does away with the regular need for the stabilizer injections that kept you alive in the first game, the core loop isn’t all that different. You’re still balancing your resources, albeit in a more streamlined fashion this time around. If you don’t keep yourself and your crew supplied, you’ll start taking damage and have less dice and less to work with. 

Eventually, you’ll also start accruing glitched dice that stack the odds against you. I liked this addition to the formula more as an idea than I did as an integral part of the Starward Vector experience. More than once, my glitched die left me trapped in a death spiral that wasn’t all that narratively interesting and felt especially tedious to play through.

Fortunately for Starward Vector, the other deviations it makes to the template laid out by the first Citizen Sleeper yield more interesting outcomes. Take the Push mechanic, for example. Depending on your class, you’ll have a new ability to play with that gives you more options. For me, this involved a free re-roll of my dice at the cost of health. This class-specific ability can be further enhanced through skill points, which are earned by completing in-game quests (referred to as drives). It’s nice to have something else to spend skill points on aside from being better at this or that.

At the same time, I ended up feeling like the push mechanics often punished me a little too harshly for making use of it. I went through some lean times in the first Citizen Sleeper, but more than once I ended up trapped in a total doom spiral as a result of using my classes' push mechanic one too many times and accidentally overloading myself with glitched dice. Even if I’m being generous and treating this as an extension of the desperation driving the game’s narrative, it felt like the game was a little too eager to kick me while I was down on my luck. 

Where adversity added to the texture of the first Citizen Sleeper, an excessive reliance on it genuinely detracted from my experience with Starward Vector. While Citizen Sleeper 2 is a tale told on a larger canvas, a lot of the low-stakes charm of the first game is lost in the process. After beating Starward Vector and then returning to its predecessor, I’m not entirely convinced that the structural shifts leave the experience better overall. 

The original Citizen Sleeper took place in a single cohesive location, which gradually got bigger and bigger as you unlocked new areas to explore. By contrast, Starward Vector comprises about ten smaller areas that you’re bouncing between by spending fuel. 

The other thing you need fuel for is completing contracts. Once you embark on one of these encounters, you’ll be locked in until you either succeed or fail. To help boost your action economy during contracts, you’re able to bring up to two crew-members with you.

As with glitched dice, I really like this idea in concept more so than execution. While there’s plenty of flavor to each accomplice you can recruit, there’s not a huge amount of mechanical differentiation between each of them. After I recruited enough companions to ensure I could take an extra four dice with me on a given contract, I rarely worried about who I was bringing to get that benefit. 

On paper, these structural changes do exactly what you’d expect. All told, they make the sequel feel like a larger adventure than the one came before it. However, the longer time you spend among the stars, the harder it becomes to overlook the reality that there’s a large amount of overlap between a lot of the locations. Most stations or outposts will usually have a market where you can buy fuel or supplies, for instance.

It doesn’t help that not a single one features an analog to the veiled virtual world that you could interface with in the first game. In addition to missing that aspect of the setting, this omission has a tangible effect on the game’s action economy. In a practical sense, you have significantly less options when it comes to making good use of any 1s or 2s you roll each in-game cycle.

Once it launches, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector will be available on PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X/S.