My personal pick at Steam Next Fest Demos this week is the Jump Ship. You may already know this as a cooperative. God Speed, Captain fart.
All previous appearances of the jump ship, including Edwin’s GDC 2024 preview, have seen it in various states with more missing parts than the game’s spacecraft after one of many one-to-Loads dogfights. However, this public demonstration also appears to be visible. This will serve as a considerable showcase for the mission loop. It seems to involve a lot of shaking rocking the grappling hook while our ship melts from inside.
Read Also:
There are plenty of out-of-the-way team shooting at your feet, but the ship is a place of heart. It’s the only thing you can meaningfully upgrade with rescued booty – the handheld weapons disappear during the field trip – and all missions begin with a vigorous debate about where to go on that metal wall. In other words, who will fly, who will be shot, and you will get engineering and repair duties. This can be put on it more than “the one who’s running around with fire extinguishers and radiation diseases and the one who’s running from all the engine leaks that occur when you start to get injured.”
Combining cooperative vehicle action with panic vehicle management is nothing new. Don’t worry about the thief’s ocean. Things like this go back to the days of Icarus and the Air Buccaneers guns, but the Jumpship version is primarily an efficient drama producer, if it’s just a variety that can explode. Spitting fire turns out to be an easy part as poor Engie throws away dangerous pieces from the airlock and reloads the ship’s weapons screaming by gunners and Helmsman, as well as needing to fire along the hull. It’s a confusing kind of thing that lifts these actions from repeated maintenance to moments of mechanical heroism. The repair kit hit the ship’s nucleus just before it exploded. Respect your sparks, people.
The fusion of jump ship ship-based and foot combat is that even with the launch of a comedy canon, the thief’s sea is not dynamistic, or at least physical. Everyone is equipped with a ridiculously accurate, long-range grappling hook that strongly encourages you to appear on the Zero-G, as well as a free-to-reuse jetpack. Therefore, temporarily abandoning a ship does not feel like a risky thing. You can drain, board enemy ships, escape, or tackle a friendly hull in seconds. Anyway, that’s ideal. In reality, someone could miss the ejection in the fog, sailing in an interesting, targeted landing zone, or even drilling a grapple too early to drill holes in the ship’s windshield like the M4’s midge. But like you accidentally c4 Deeprock Galactic teammates, this game is generous enough to keep these as adorable accidents rather than punishing the errors that you perform.
A more focused FPS section where crews are contained to fight through the base is a much simpler issue. Gunplay is very smooth in the debut indie project (lack of junk in general – the jump ship has come a long way from Hyperspace Jaunt, which is home to many of Sing’s unfortunate placeholders), but in the end the only challenge here is unlocking the doors and the blow-up bot. And the latter does not actually have any traits or animation responses, as it feels compelling to its gunfighting opponent.
Still, I was still chasing my pulse in the demo. Usually when there is a ship that remembers that it is more valuable than either of our lives. One mission of disabling and looting bot-controlled cargo ships involves time limits conspired with a seemingly endless fleet of enemy ships, forcing a under-staffed three-person team (4 players standard). This plan was for my two strong boarding parties to grab the goods, and the captain did the air dodge outside and docked only when we were ready to leave, but the overwhelming firepower quickly began to destroy the ship’s important pipes and pistons. This left our away team the option: sticking to the mission and hoping the ship can come back to life, or can we send it back to take over the repairs? We go to the latter and dodge only the cargo hold defense. Ammunition is decreasing rapidly.
I’ve already probably just too many Matey games on the go. I’ve still been playing DRG and Darktide for almost a few weeks. I’d like to try FBC: Firebreak. Eldenling: Nightrign: Nightrign can persuade anyone (including Nic, The Quitter) to play with me. But I still want to make time for the jump ship. In just two hours, I filmed as easily as romping sci-fi adventures as Generoddenberry’s cocaine fantasy, and along the way I filmed the opportunity for spontaneous laughter. You can try the demo yourself on Steam.