Jump Ship a sci-fi themed first-person shooter created by the Swedish studio Keepsake Games, designed to be played in cooperative mode for up to 4 players, but also playable in single player. The game was presented by the studio’s lead designer Filip Coulians, one of the founders of the Swedish studio Hazelight and now involved at the forefront of this new adventure. Jump Ship proposes a classic “mission” structure, in which the fire group decides which task to undertake, choosing between missions of varying difficulty and type, and then returning to a hangar which acts as a central hub where it is possible to upgrade and customize your equipment, and then set off on a new adventure.
MX Video – Jump Ship
If the gameplay loop is not particularly innovative, an element of certain interest is the presence of a full-scale spaceship, of which the gaming group constitutes the crew. It will therefore be necessary to also deal with the management of this imposing space vessel and from this point of view Jump Ship it can also be considered as a sort of “space Sea of Thieves”, as the developers themselves like to define it: there is someone who has to pilot the spaceship (which happens in third person, with a view outside the shuttle), someone must commit to putting out the fires that enemy attacks can generate on board, and it is also possible to position themselves on the external deck of the ship to engage in firefights with the enemies. In fact, the use of the spaceship is not limited to the context of interplanetary space travel, but is even more interesting when descending into the atmosphere of a planet (or onto the desolate surface of an asteroid). At that moment the spaceship is used to “navigate” to the designated point of interest, for example an outpost that you want to explore: in doing so you have to deal with other enemy vessels, which must be faced or circumvented by maneuvering furtively.
Once you reach the designated point, the spaceship is “moored” and the game behaves like a more classic cooperative FPS: you move on foot, although with the possibility of using jetpacks that allow you to travel short distances in flight. Once again the parallel with Sea of Thieves can hold in broad terms, but in the case of Jump Ship the intensity and dynamism of the fights is decidedly higher, effectively forcing much closer and more active coordination between the players. Furthermore, the “aerial” dimension we talked about previously continues to play an important role: for example, the enemy reconnaissance planes that we bypassed with the spaceship to get closer to our objective could continue to patrol the skies above it, detect the our group and engage us. Conversely, we have the possibility of sending one or more members of the group to the spaceship, to take off and hunt down opposing aircraft, and to use appropriate surface-to-air weapons (in the sequences shown to us we were able to see a player shoot down an aircraft with a homing missile).
Each mission has a main objective to achieve, but it is always possible that things take an unexpected turn: for example, we had the opportunity to see a group of pirate ships ambush the group of four players, as they left a base. Answering a question about games that have in some way influenced the creation of Jump ShipCoulianos cited Left 4 Dead also explicitly referring to the concept of a “Director/Director” who dynamically places obstacles and unexpected events in the players’ path, depending on their behavior: one can therefore expect to experience a great variety of situations, even within missions of the same type.
The gameplay seen mainly showed us an arid planet, but the presence of different biomes was confirmed, as was the possibility of landing on asteroids and wrecks adrift in space.
The game made with the Unity engine and technically seems well set up. Calibrating expectations reasonably (Coulianos spoke of a development team made up of about ten people…) even the graphics sector seemed up to par, compensating in the effectiveness of the settings for what it perhaps fails to achieve in terms of pure level of detail and frame rate. The gunplay left less precise sensations, with an audio sector that seemed a bit disappointing and a variety of the arsenal still to be explored in depth, as well as the possibility of enhancing them: Coulianos was explicit about the possibilities of upgrading the spaceship (going so far as to define it as a “collective character”, whose build must be taken care of), while he was much more vague on player customization, speaking of customizable helmets and suits, but not of weapons, and in any case without specifying whether with purely cosmetic effects or impacts on the gameplay.
Definitely Jump Ship It seemed like a really promising title. I have some personal reservations about how it can work in single player, but the combination of “navigation” phases with ground combat phases seemed intriguing to me, especially by virtue of a design of environments and missions decisively oriented towards bringing the team to a truly cooperative approach. We’ll know more when we can play it in the next few months; the game should in fact arrive in Game Preview by the end of the year.