Jump Space

It's fantastic, get it

It's a fun game with friends, worth playing, performs well on my specs for the most part. You crew a spaceship and jump between different self-contained arenas, completing different tasks depending on whichever map you loaded into. Some are ship-to-ship combat, some are on-foot combat, some have other objectives like pressing buttons, carrying objects, holding control points etc. The ships vary in size, once you unlock them all you can pick the one best suited to your group's size. Some ships are too big to manage with fewer people mostly because each role becomes more specialized rather than there being more workload. You usually need at least a pilot, gunner and someone to run around putting out fires and other tasks For example the smallest ship gives the pilot the ability to fly the ship (duh) but also gives two pilot weapons so they can shoot stuff pretty well, then there's a roof-mounted turret that someone else can operate. 2 people can run this ship fine because the pilot can fight ships quite effectively while the gunner gets off the turret to put out fires if needed. The medium (default) ship gets one pilot gun but 2 roof mounted special weapons and a 360 degree turret system that can be used by a dedicated gunner, the gunner does more fighting than the pilot now, and neither has time to get off and put out fires so you need at least 3 people to run this ship. The largest ship has two gunner stations with limited line of sight on each, and the pilot has no weapons, and it's annoyingly big so you spend a lot of time running around, I don't know how many people would be needed to run this ship effectively or if there's any real reason to use it. You can acquire ship upgrades and new handheld weapons on missions, you save them by scanning them and saving them into slots tied to your character, which then allows you to fabricate them or fit them to your ship. You spend different colored ingot/token things to upgrade both handheld guns and ship components, and these things also have intrinsic levels and unique perks when you find them. Meaning you can save and upgrade one version of a ship's engine for example, but then find a better version of that same engine. If you want to use it you can't transfer any upgrades over from the old version, so you basically have to throw it and any ingots spent on it away and replace it with a version that has a higher upgrade ceiling or better bonuses, but no actual upgrades. Thus the upgrade economy tends to be bottlenecked at the low end, because everything initially needs the low-end ingots to upgrade and its much less likely that you'll need the high-end ones. I have hundreds of the higher-level purple orange and red ingots, and I can't spend them on anything because I have no greens or blues. Also requiring the same resources to upgrade ship components vs on-foot weapons is a slight problem. If you're the host of your games you probably want to upgrade your ship, if you're a passenger princess then you can just upgrade your hand-held weapons. My group tends to find the ship-to-ship engagements rather easy, we have a superior mining laser muli-turret which does 2000 dps and basically vaporizes groups of enemies, but then we have to get out of the ship and fight drones on foot and the hand-held weapons are very ammo hungry and rather lacking in stopping power, and some enemies like sniper or rocket drones will just wreck you, and since the enemies are all just floating black boxes with red lights on them, often in an environment with black walls full of red lights... it's not super easy to identify priority targets at a glance. Still, it's early access, and hopefully issues get addressed. But it's a good game if you have a group to play with. I've never tried playing with randos, but I never do with these types of games.