My personal pick of this week’s Steam Next Fest demos is Jump Ship, which you might already know as that co-operative, ‘Left 4 Dead meets FTL meets Sea of Thieves‘ space crew shooter previously known as Hyperspace. Godspeed, Captain Farts.
All our previous looks at Jump Ship, including Edwin’s GDC 2024 preview, have seen it in varying states of unreadiness, with more missing parts than the game’s own spaceship after one of its many 1 vs. Loads dogfights. This public demo, however, looks and feels fairly polished, allowing it to serve as a rather moreish showcase of its mission loops. Which, at least for me and a couple of crewmates, seem to involve a lot of swishing around on grappling hooks while our vessel melts from within.
There’s plenty of on-foot, away-team shooting to be done, but the ship is where the heart is. It’s the only thing you can meaningfully upgrade with salvaged loot – handheld weapons vanish between excursions – and every mission begins with a spirited debate over who goes where within its metal walls. In other words, who gets to fly, who gets to shoot, and who gets engineering and repair duty, which is a nicer of putting it than “You’ll be the one running around with a fire extinguisher and radiation sickness from all the engine leaks that will happen when we start taking damage.”
Combining co-op vehicle action with panicky vehicle management isn’t new – never mind Sea of Thieves, this stuff goes back to the days of Guns of Icarus and Air Buccaneers – but Jump Ship’s version is still an efficient drama producer, if mainly for just the variety of things that can explode. Quelling fires, it turns out, is the easy part, as poor engies also need to scurry around dumping hazardous debris out of airlocks, reloading the ships’ weapons while being shouted at by gunner and helmsman alike, and may even need to spacewalk onto the hull to shoot off embedded mines before they detonate. It’s chaos, but the kind that elevates these acts from repetitive maintenance to moments of mechanical heroism: a repair kit slammed into the ship’s core just before it detonates, or the deployment of a fresh railgun module that turns the tide of a losing battle. Respect your sparkies, people.
Jump Ship’s blending of ship-based and on-foot fighting also has a dynamism, or at least a physicality, that Sea of Thieves – even with its comedy cannon launching – doesn’t match. Everyone is equipped with a preposterously accurate, long-range grappling hook that strongly encourages you to get out into zero-G, as does your freely reusable jetpack. Temporarily abandoning ship thus never feels like too big of a risk: you can eject, zip over to board an enemy vessel, boost away and grapple back onto a friendly hull in seconds. That’s the ideal, anyway. In practice it’s equally likely that someone will mistime their ejection and sail amusingly past their targeted landing zone, or release their grapple too early and ping into the ship’s windshield like a midge on the M4. But, like accidentally C4’ing a teammate in Deep Rock Galactic, the game is forgiving enough to keep these as loveable mishaps rather than punishing, run-ruining errors.
The more focused FPS sections, where the crew disembarks to fight through a base, are much simpler affairs. Gunplay is impressively smooth for a debut indie project (as is the lack of jank in general – Jump Ship has come a long way from Sin’s ill-fated, placeholder-heavy Hyperspace jaunt), but ultimately the only challenges here are unlocking doors and blasting bots. And the latter don’t really have the characterisation, nor the animation responses, to feel like compelling shootout opponents.
Yet I’ve still had pulse-quickening raids in the demo, usually when the ship – which, remember, is worth more than any of our lives – remains in play. On one mission to disable and plunder a bot-controlled cargo ship, a time limit conspired with a seemingly endless flotilla of enemy ships, forcing our understaffed three-man team (four players is standard) to split up. The plan was for my two-strong boarding party to grab the goods while the captain performed aerial evasives outside, only docking when we were ready to leave, but overwhelming firepower soon started wrecking the ship’s vital pipes and pistons regardless. This left our away team with a choice: stick to the mission and hope the ship can cling to life, or send one back to take over repairs? We went for the latter, leaving me to fend off the cargo hold’s defences alone, ammo rapidly dwindling, until our patched-up craft came soaring back to rescue me in turn.
I already have, probably, too many matey games on the go. I’m still playing DRG and Darktide most weeks, am eager to try FBC: Firebreak, and would be far deeper into Elden Ring: Nightreign if I could convince anyone (including Nic, the quitter) to play with me. I still want to make time for Jump Ship, though. In just two hours it’s plonked me in as many romping sci-fi adventures as a Gene Roddenberry cocaine fantasy, with ample and readily taken opportunities for spontaneous laughs along the way. You can try the demo yourself on Steam.