Machine LearningCitizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector reviewA thrilling and reflective dice-driven RPG that continues to subvert modern sci-fi as we know it.Image credit: VG247 Review by Rachel Watts Contributor Published on Jan. 30, 2025 As I played through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, I couldn't get the image of a 'whale fall' out of my head. When whales die, their giant bodies sink to the dark depths of the seafloor, feeding and nourishing an entire ecosystem of deep sea creatures. The world of Citizen Sleeper has been through its own climatic event. This sci-fi story takes place in the shadow of the once monolithic Solheim corporation which has now collapsed. The fall of this giant has led to a new way of life. Everyone is surviving on the outcome of this collapse, scavenging its flesh and picking its bones clean. The Sleepers story is just one out of hundreds, all feeding off the guts of a fallen leviathan.To see this content please enable targeting cookies. As someone who loved the first Citizen Sleeper, my feelings were that it didn't need a sequel. It felt perfectly 'complete'. What else was left to explore in this world? Well, it turns out that there's a lot more, and I quickly fell in love with this harsh-but-beautiful transhumanist world all over again. I was genuinely sad when the credits rolled. Like its older sibling, Citizen Sleeper 2 is a reflective, subversive, and utterly absorbing sci-fi adventure.You once again play as an eponymous Sleeper, a human mind nestled in a prosthetic body of wires, skeletal metalwork, and synth meat. You wake up as an amnesiac, your long-term memories remain, but short-term memories are unmoored from your body. After a blur of panic and action, you find yourself once again on the run. You may have escaped your corporate creators, but this time youre trying to escape a 'friend' now turned powerful foe. Turns out space gangsters dont like it when you want autonomy over your own body.You're now forced to begin a new life as a runaway, surviving off gig work and dice rolls. Everything is told via evocative text, your Sleeper describing the sights, smells, and sounds of everything around you. Visually, you only see the exterior of locations and can click on location markers on a map to view events. Citizen Sleeper's RPG system works on a dice economy. You roll five dice at the start of your day (known as a cycle) and can apply the result of each dice to actions, moving clocks forward until you have finished your objective. The higher the roll, the more successful the outcome. Energy and money are your priorities, so gig work is vital to make ends meet. Locations you can travel and available contracts can be seen on the map, but youll need enough fuel and supplies to make the journey.Image credit: Fellow TravellerThe entirety of the first game's story takes place on a singular space station, so you slowly build up a familiarity with the location, like where to get regular work, which food vendor makes the best grub, and knowing a handful of friendly faces you can rely on. This feeling of safety has totally disappeared in Citizen Sleeper 2. Your Sleeper now needs to bounce between different locations because if you stay anywhere too long, youll be found.You now need to travel up and down a wider network of stations and satellites called The Belt, never staying in one place for too long. The safety of knowing your way around one location is entirely gone, and the tension of needing to stay ahead of your pursuer means you need to be prepared for whatever waits for you at the next location.This nomad mindset plays into the biggest difference between CS1 and CS2: tension. Delicious tension. Citizen Sleeper 2 really ramps up the pressures and stresses of being on the run and trying to survive. A criticism of CS1 is it's possible to get yourself to a place of comfort relatively easily. A small warning: that will not happen here. And it makes for a better game. I realized this at the start of Day Two when my shipmate shook me awake, with a morning greeting of "we're in trouble." This Sleeper cannot catch a break, and by extension, that means you too. You can choose between three classes: Operator, Extractor, and Machinist. | Image credit: Fellow TravellerIt's intense, but exciting. Citizen Sleeper 2 has a bold new set of systems that really amp up the thrill. One of the biggest new introductions are Contracts; big-risk, big-payout missions where you fly to a location and must carry out a mission under time pressure. You also need to hire a crew to come help you out, each member having their own skills and dice you can assign.So many things can go wrong with these contracts, a big one being stress levels. Whenever a skill check is failed the character takes one stress counter, and if a crew member takes on too much they bow out of the mission altogether. If your Sleeper takes on too much stress they can crack their dice making them unusable until they're fixed, which is Very Bad. Failed checks can also trigger an event crisis, which you'll have to resolve to keep the mission on track.With all the dice, stress counters, crisis events, and countdowns to keep in mind, these Contracts are deviously good fun. Carefully assigning my crew's dice, looking at numbers and symbols, and pushing my luck by pulling off risky moves, - it's like tinkering with the inner workings of a machine that could blow up in my face any second. I lost track of the number of times I crossed my fingers and prayed to whatever space God the 50% chance of a negative outcome wouldn't bite me in the ass. That feeling was a high I was forever chasing, and it meant I took bigger risks, way bigger than I ever would have in the first game.So important to pick the right crew. You need to mitigate, and anticipate, the shopping list of reasons of things that can go wrong. Your Sleeper has an RPG-style class with upgradable abilities, but one skill will always remain completely blocked off and unavailable to upgrade. This means you need to rely on others for your weaknesses. Just like real life.If you find yourself up against an event that requires a skill check none of your crew excels in, it can mean trouble. This system might lead you to see characters as walking dice sets to use at your disposal, but over time you learn that they're survivors just like you who have their own messy stories. You can decide who gets to permanently join your crew and over time, learn more about them. Its important to think about their skills and usefulness, but they feel more than just tools. They are kindred spirits just like the Sleeper. Your battered spaceship becomes a haven for them, a home to those found wandering The Belt. Guillaume Singelin's detailed character art returns for this sequel. | Image credit: Fellow TravellerYou might even run into some familiar faces on your adventures. Your current sleeper is different from the sleeper in the first game, but seeing them is still comforting is a little bittersweet. It's been many years since the first game, meaning that theyve changed. Hardened and rough around the edges. Its confronting, and really drives home how living in a world gripped by the cruelties of corporate capitalism can change a person.This sentiment is masterfully achieved through Citizen Sleeper 2s writing, which remains as rich, punchy, and visceral as the first game. Gareth Damian Martin gives a beating heart to bustling cities and breathes life into the machines - it's wonderfully evocative writing. I took screenshots of so many quotes I couldn't bear to forget. My screenshot folder usually acts as a photo album of holiday snaps from my virtual adventures. Here, its like dog-earring pages passages from your favourite book.A testament to how good the writing is when s**t does hit the fan, the direction the story goes in is just as interesting, sometimes even more so than when things go smoothly. Citizen Sleeper 2 has RPG-style story decisions that are thrust upon you during story sections. No dice rolls, just a reliance on your current skills. Whatever the outcome, you can always rely on something wild happening. I've drilled to the center of a frozen asteroid, failed to incite a mutiny on a labor ship, helped build the foundations of a colony on a meteorite, chatted with the broken mind of a dying machine - it's been an absolute rollercoaster. Skills checks during story moments might force you to a specific choice, unless you want to take a major risk. | Image credit: Fellow TravellerOne fantastic bit of writing Id like to highlight without giving away spoilers is about the character Serafin. When you wake up at the start of the game, Serafin is one of the first people you see and you soon find out the two of you have shared history. However, because of your amnesia, you dont remember him. You don't recall the friendship you shared, it is completely lost. This is pretty devastating. Serafin has to go through the grief of losing a friend and the Sleeper needs to grapple with the feeling of having someone know them but not able to return that connection. This situation is painful and fully felt by both characters. It's poignant human drama and that underlines the entire game, from beginning to end.But the two learn to rebuild what was lost, a microcosm of the bigger picture. That everything is in a constant state of change, that the Sleeper, and the world they exist in, is in a state of transformation, a process that will never end. To rebuild on what was there before, to see the ruins of something as not an end but a beginning.Between musings of transhumanism, capitalism, power, and technology are human stories about real people. No space wizards, no ship shootouts, no heroes. Just the everyday reality of folks trying to survive. Its incredibly grounded, and something I wish we would see more of in sci-fi. Citizen Sleepers world belongs to its junkyard scavengers, grubby engineers, repair technicians, cargo haulers, and everyone else on this ramshackle asteroid belt. I dont want the glitz and gloss of Starfield, Star Wars Outlaws, or Cyberpunk 2077. I want grounded, punchy stories about nobodies, and thats what Citizen Sleeper 2 is. What a fantastic start to 2025.Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector arrives on PC, Xbox Game Pass, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 5 on January 31. This review is written based on PC code provided by the publisher.