Earlier this year, I had a good old time with Jump Space (née Ship)’s Steam Next Fest demo, in part because the demo’s spaceship crewing and on-foot FPSing seemed to be in better technical shape than previous jaunts into the starry wastes. The bad news is that in the light of a full early access release, it’s become easier to spot the cracks in the hull and the improperly fastened screw heads in the life support system. The good news? It’s still good enough at inducing a high-fiving co-op buzz that I am, at the very least, willing to give it the time to tighten up.
It’s still a confident combination of Sea of Thieves and Deep Rock Galactic, where up to four soldiernauts share piloting, gunning, and repair duties as they take a single frigate through roguelite runs of salvage and sabotage missions. Extended beyond the confines of a demo, though, some of those missions start to repeat themselves quickly. Especially early on – I must have raided the cargo of four or five identical crashed freighters before progressing far enough across the galaxy map to unlock some more varied quest types.
And it’s not just the objectives that are hastily reused. While Jump Space’s library of far future spacescapes can turn up some very striking backdrops, its interiors – be they evacuated satellite stations or planetside strongholds – become familiar in short order too. Which is a shame, as the landing-party firefights are one thing that’s noticeably improved from the demo, with snappier guns and more dramatic impacts when their ammo connect with angry robot chassis. I just wish I had someplace more exciting to blast through than the same handful of corridors and cargo bays. It also doesn’t help that Jump Space goes for a similarly grounded, “NASApunk” aesthetic to Starfield, which in practice means some reasonably practical-looking spacesuits and a whole lot of grey.
The launch build isn’t short on garden-variety early access jank, too. Stuttering is common, especially when fires break out aboard a battered ship, and a lot of third-person and enemy bot animations don’t always play out to completion. I can sort-of forgive the use of a generative AI voice for your ship’s sentient core, on the grounds that she’s an actual AI, but it still has her robovoice reading out lines with basic grammatical errors. I’ve also seen at least one missing UI icon clunkily filled in with a scribbled “Not made :(“, and one of my online games suffered a minor communication breakdown when some of the onscreen text swapped from my local language settings to the host’s presumably native French. Renforts de vaisseaux ennemis? Putain if I know.
And yet, for all of this wonkiness, for all of Jump Space’s repetition and missed opportunities to get truly sci-fi weird, I’m absolutely going to play it again – if primarily with trusted anglophone friends.
Greyness, in this case, doesn’t mean blandness. It just means Jump Space expresses its personality elsewhere, namely in the barely controlled chaos that breaks out in dogfights, as well as the devious manner in which it splits up and stretches your crew across its later, trickier missions. It has a cheeky side, this game – the kind that’ll push you to the brink of failure, stay its hand instead of striking a finishing blow, then congratulate you on surviving itself.
First, those space battles. There is a certain, productive pleasure in everyone adequate filling their roles – the gunner swatting down fighters from the combat station, engineers keeping ammo and shields topped up. Like so many co-op games, though, Jump Space is more exciting when things go wrong. And on this boat, an awful lot of things can go wrong. Engine damage cacking the steering; radiation leaks interfering with power delivery to subsystems; crewmates torpedoing themselves into space because they tried to eject straight onto the hull and overshot.
While a lot of these mishaps are simply funny, it gets downright raucous when all systems are red. When the captain has to abandon the helm, because everyone else is too busy extinguishing engine fires and repairing the busted railguns to notice that a stack of mines are about to detonate three metres away from the bridge. I’m sure this sounds stressful, because it is, but this is also when Jump Space most often comes alive. The default ship is manoeuvrable and powerful from the off, and gets upgraded across successful runs – to counterbalance that, I want the danger, the feeling that even with all our shields and guns, I still have to move fast and keep my head to squeak through combat without becoming space debris. And it delivers, again and again.
There’s a comparable feeling of skirting under the breaking point in later missions, where time constraints or enemy pressure forces the crew to fracture: some going for ground objectives, some staying in the ship to keep it from being blown to bits on the landing pad. If anything, these are even more tense, as you don’t even have the benefit of proximity to teammates. You must trust them, and they you, even with the inherent added risk of crewing a ship or assaulting a base with diminished numbers. It’s a harsh but clever twist on cooperative mission structure that, simultaneously, makes sure you can never get too comfortable about the power of any weapons or upgrades you’ve accumulated during a run.
This is something I’ve personally been missing from my Thursday game night regulars. As much as I appreciate DRG and Darktide, it’s been a while since I’ve played either of them for the challenge, rather than to provide background entertainment while I enjoy a nice chat with my mates. Jump Space has a lot of early access road left to travel, with both technical struggles and artistic weaknesses to overcome. But I hope it does, because I do rather enjoy being on a ship that’s five to ten seconds away from snapping in half.