Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector from developer Jump Over The Age and publisher Fellow Traveller is the sequel to 2022’s Citizen Sleeper, and like the first game, it’s a dice-driven RPG reminiscent of a tabletop experience. While there are a few additions to the sequel, it is largely a very similar game. So if you were a fan of the first game, you will have a great time with the sequel as well. But if you never played the original—don’t worry, you can jump into the sequel with no prior knowledge.
Like in the first game, you’re a Sleeper, an android with a mind based on a real human. You wake up with no memories. All you really know is that Serafin is your ally with whom you escape from Laine, the leader of a criminal gang. The two of you quickly gather whatever scraps you can get your hands on and fly away on a stolen, and barely functioning, spaceship. You have no idea who you are or what’s going on, but with a body that’s barely holding together and bounty hunters after you, there’s no choice but to keep moving forward.
The biggest addition Citizen Sleeper 2 makes to its predecessor is the rig that you escape on. It means this time you’re not trapped in one location but can actually move between different stations, vastly increasing the space you can explore. It’s kind of an obvious step for a sequel to take. In the first game you were limited to a single station but heard about the existence of others, so now you can traverse between multiple of them. And it’s great! It makes the world of Citizen Sleeper feel bigger (because it is), allows for some variation, and lets the developers add even more characters and sprawling storylines. It unfortunately also means that none of the stations in Citizen Sleeper 2 by themselves are as interesting as the one station from the first game. By widening the scope, you lose some of the detail.
Citizen Sleeper 2 is a game broken up into cycles (essentially days), and at the start of every cycle, your five dice slots are refilled. They range from one to six, and for most actions you want to do, you will need to use one of them, the number on the dice deciding how likely you are to succeed. That’s about the extent of the system in the original game, but in Citizen Sleeper 2 there’s also an added stress level for each dice slot that affects how good/bad the dice you can get are—to the point that your dice slot can break, preventing you from getting any dice at all—as well as the newly introduced glitch dice that have an 80% chance of failure no matter what.
Naturally you can deal with your stress and fix your dice slots, but you need the money to do so. But with so many other things to spend your money on, that might be difficult to do. You need food, fuel for your ship, and items for missions (in particular to either fix your ship or yourself)… juggling all of that is extremely difficult, especially at the beginning of the game, and the dice that slowly disappear if you don’t invest in them regularly make it all so much worse. Luckily, there’s a new way to make a bunch of money all at once that has been introduced with the sequel.
Thanks to your (barely functioning) space rig, you can now accept contracts to salvage shipwrecks. After accepting a contract, you simply have to pick some crew members—oh yeah, have I mentioned that Citizen Sleeper 2 has a party system? Not that it’s really used for anything else, though—and travel to the location of the shipwreck. Once you’re there, the struggle begins. You have a limited amount of time to look through the wreckage and hopefully find what you’re looking for. You do so, as you do anything, by using your dice. Except you don’t just have your usual five dice to play with but also two dice for each crew member you took along for the mission.
What makes these contracts so stressful, though, is that in addition to the ticking time clock, any failed dice roll will increase the stress level of your characters, even leading to them eventually being unable to take further actions. And if you end a contract without finding the object you’re looking for, you’re completely screwed. You will have invested quite a few resources and have dealt serious damage to your dice slots without making any money back. Recovering from such a hit is anything but easy.
Having said that, I find Citizen Sleeper 2 is not as effective as the original was when it comes to exploring its theme of late-stage capitalism. The story here is much more a crime saga, and while the theme of capitalism is certainly still present, it doesn’t feel as direct of a confrontation with it. It’s just trying to do more now, tell a bigger story with different avenues to take, and it loses some of the focus in doing so.
Like the first game, Citizen Sleeper 2 once again looks absolutely fantastic. Every character looks unique and extremely cool with its futuristic cyberpunk aesthetic. The larger cast of colorful characters (literally) in the sequel only helps to emphasize how strong the designs are. And where the first game’s soundtrack was my favorite of that year (and frankly one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time), the sequel also delivers here. And while it might be a bit too soon to talk about favorites of the year at the end of January, something really strong would have to come to take its early throne.
Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector is a bigger game than its predecessor. Deepening older mechanics like the dice system and adding new mechanics with the space rig, as well as widening the horizon of both the story and world you can explore. But is it a better game? I’m not sure. This isn’t to say it’s a worse game than the first either, but in broadening its scope, it has lost some of the intimacy of its character’s relationships, some detail of the world you get to live in, and some focus on the themes it’s exploring. It’s in many ways a step forward for the franchise, but it makes a few sacrifices along the way.
Nairon played Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector on PC with a review code.