Quick Stats

Time Played: 53 hours, 47 minutes (two playthroughs)
Difficulty Played: Normal
Amount Completed: Finished the main game, but did not get all achievements
Platform: Windows PC with an XBOX controller
Plan to 100%: Probably not

Citizen Sleeper 2 is not an easy game for me to describe. It is heavily story-driven and in one sense is akin to a graphic novel with static images with a lot of text to read. However, it is much more engaging than just making dialog and action choices as there are role-playing and strategy elements along with a good helping of chance. On my first playthrough, I underestimated the thought that I should put into how I approached this game and missed out on a lot of the storyline and tension that this game provides. However, it was intriguing enough that I did something that I rarely do and played the game though a second time, changing my approach and taking things more seriously in the process.

The character you play is an android who has been imprinted with the mind of a deceased human. Machine-human hybrids like your character are called “sleepers” and are basically used as forced labor. In the first game of this series, which I also played and enjoyed, you are trying to break free from the technology used to make you reliant on regular doses of something called “stabilizer” to keep your mind and body operational. This stabilizer is not easy to come by making you fairly reliant on your “owner” to provide a regular supply. At the start of this game, you are in the middle of a process to remove your need for this stabilizer, but that process is interrupted. While you were successful in making it so you no longer need stabilizer to survive, you cannot remember much of your past.

At the core of the game are a set of dice that are assigned random values at the start of each “cycle”. During a cycle you have various options on what you can do based on where you are and what things you have discovered in that area. There are also places where you can spend currency that you have earned by doing jobs or through exploration to purchase supplies such as food and fuel. Any action other than buying something requires using one of your dice. Each die has a value from one to six, and each action has various attributes, in conjunction with various skills that you may have, that determine how successful you will be at completing that action. There are cases where you have a 100% chance of completing something without any negative outcomes based on the value of the die and the action, but usually the odds are not as clear. Each outcome may be one of “positive” which provides the best result with no impacts to you, “neutral” which may give you less positive effects along with mild consequences, or “negative” which you want to avoid. Typical breakdowns of outcomes are 100% positive, 50% positive / 50% neutral, 25% positive / 50% neutral / 25% negative, 50% neutral / 50% negative, and 100% negative. When all of your dice have been used, you must end the cycle and start the next with a new set of dice rolls.

All this just scratches the surface of the gameplay as there are also skills that you have and can grow based on completing certain missions that add or subtract from the value of the die you play, stress that can be gained by neutral or negative outcomes that can damage your dice, hunger (you need to eat on a regular basis) that can impact your dice, and more such as other people with different skills that you can try to recruit to your crew that can in certain cases add additional dice to use. On top of that, there are many things that cannot be completed with just one die and there are times where you only have a certain amount of cycles to complete something. On certain “missions” there are usually multiple things to complete each needing multiple dice and under a time limit. This really adds to the strategy of which dice (and possibly your crew’s dice and skills) you use for certain things and potentially juggling multiple objectives.

Honestly, it is not too complex a system once one understands it and all the various gains and losses that can occur based on your choices. But it also really adds to the tension of your choices and the impact–good or bad–that the element of chance contributes to those choices. For example, you may be on a mission where there are at least three more positive dice outcomes needed to complete in only one more cycle. Do you take the risk of using a die that has only a 50% neutral / 50% negative chance of finishing one of those tasks that, if negative, will break one of your dice making it unusable the next cycle and hope for a couple values in the next cycle’s (random) roll that will give you almost guaranteed success for the remaining tasks? Or do you just end the cycle without potentially breaking a die hoping for three “very good” rolls the next cycle?

The first time I played this game I did not look at the “guide” that explains how all the systems work, and just let the game explain it while playing. That was a mistake. What makes this worse is that the guide is not very long and fills in a lot of gaps that I initially had through gameplay alone. And by the time I had mostly figured out the systems, I had so many issues with my dice that I played most of my first game with a severe handicap. However, by the time I realized this, I had already spent over 20 hours in the game and figured I would just “power though” to see the story unfold to its conclusion. This was another mistake as I should have just started over at that point and frankly made better, more informed decisions. The result is that on my first playthrough, while concluded and credits rolled, was missing a lot of the story. And this game is, as I said, very story-driven. My second playthrough was much more satisfying, engaging, and enjoyable.

This is probably a very niche game, but I am very glad that it exists. The writing is excellent my view and tells a story that connects with me. There were times where my brain just went on auto-pilot, but that grind did not fatigue me too much as, like I said, I did something I rarely do and played it a second time start to finish. I liked the first game in this series and at the point of finishing it was looking forward to the DLC that came later. But I am not really a DLC-type person, so never did that. From what I can remember from the first game, Citizen Sleeper 2 really improved on the game mechanics and added more thought and impact to your decisions.