Everyone was disappointed when they found out that Starfield wouldn’t have seamless space travel. Maybe it’s a technical gripe, but it does mess with the rhythm – the dream of the space game is being able to course through the galaxy, touch down on a distant planet, explore on foot, and then jet off again all in one operatic motion. It’s not an RPG. Its world isn’t as big. But Jump Ship, the upcoming co-op shooter from Keepsake Games, is built around this kind of flow. Sometimes you’re in dogfights like No Man’s Sky and Elite Dangerous. Other times, it’s all about keeping your ship online, a la FTL. And then of course you have the co-op raids. Jump Ship could be very special indeed. And thankfully, you can try it yourself soon.
So here’s how it works. You start in your hangar – ideally, it’s you and three friends. The star system is being slowly destroyed by a spreading, oozing corruption that lives at the heart of the universe. Clearing sector by galactic sector, your job is to make your way to the middle of the game world and finally defeat whatever big evil is lurking there. When you’re fighting on the ground, Jump Ship is an FPS. But then you’re back to the ship and, depending on what you prefer, it can be a space game or even a strategy game.
See, every mission requires you to make a number of light jumps – you start at waypoint A, but your actual objective might be at waypoint E, and that means you have to travel through waypoints B, C, and D. Every time you exit out of lightspeed, there could be anything there waiting for you. Maybe it’s a squadron of enemy fighters ready for an ambush, or perhaps an asteroid belt. The universe of Jump Ship isn’t open, but it’s not a case of just choosing a mission and then starting a mission – you have to travel first.
And this is where it gets interesting. One person flies, one person mans the turrets, one person is down in the engine room, and one person is out on the deck. A group of enemy battleships appears and a huge dogfight breaks out. The person on deck can leap off the side and, using a jet pack, zip across open space to try and sabotage the opponents’ power cores.
When you get hit and certain systems start to fail, the poor sucker in the engine room needs to rip out engine parts and replace them with fresh ones before they explode, or redirect power from one section of the ship to another. Meanwhile, the other two players are trying to dodge incoming attacks via the controls and mow down everything they can with the mounted guns.
It’s all seamless. This is all happening at once. The headline, ‘oh wow’ moment of Jump Ship is when everything just comes organically together. During my own playthrough, I was the one on the turret gun. I was blasting away, and I could see my comrade leap off with the jet pack and fly towards the enemy fleet. Our pilot took us in close while I held off the swarm.
We started taking damage – on the comms, our engineer was warning us that the deck-mounted automated guns would have to be pulled offline to keep the boosters intact. It looked bad, but suddenly the enemy’s mother ship exploded, and our pal with the jet pack came hurtling back towards us. The pilot swerved to catch him, and he latched onto the deck and came sauntering through the airlock back onto the bridge. It was a huge, multifaceted space battle with all four players taking different roles – and again, all seamless.
Eventually, you reach your objective planet, touch down, and dismount, and then Jump Ship feels closer to Payday. Working as a team, you gun down landbound enemies and crack the security systems to ancient, extraterrestrial vaults. Sometimes it’s loot for upgrading your craft. Sometimes it’s key items that advance the story and unlock new missions. Everything you find, you take back to the ship. And then you have to fight your way home.
Nobody picks a role. Nobody is bound to a specific class. Whenever you go out on a mission, you can all do whatever you like – if you want to, you can all go for the mounted guns and fight your battles at a distance, or maybe all jump off the side and storm the enemy mother ship en masse. Even at this in-progress stage, Jump Ship feels completely fluid. More than any of its major contemporaries, it seems to have captured and consolidated the essence of the space adventure.
There’s no set release date yet, but Jump Ship will launch into early access this summer. In the meantime, Keepsake is about to launch the first closed beta. If you want to sign up, you can do so right here.
Otherwise, try some of the best games like Starfield, or maybe the best multiplayer games on PC.
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