LogFAQs > #932653445

#39





Years of release: 2015 (PC/XB1), 2016 (PS4), 2017 (Switch)
Beaten?: Yes

I have this one friend, Matt, who I met in college - he was in the same music classes as me and he ran the college's board game club for a while, and sometimes we'd meet at his place nearby and play a bunch of couch multiplayer games on Steam, which was convenient because he had a nice setup with a big TV and multiple controllers and I don't. Quite a few of the games on my list are here only as a result of gaming sessions with him. He's lived out of the state for a couple years now and I miss him - I hope he gets back here someday, because there's a lot of games that I don't get the chance to play in a local setting without his help.

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is one of my favorite co-op games I played with him while he was here. In this game, each of 2-4 players play as a single occupant in a circular spaceship with multiple different modules that you control one at a time; the piloting, one gun on each of its four sides, a shield that you can move around, and a big cannon that you can fire off occasionally. It feels a little FTL-ish with its management, although this is an action game instead of a strategy game - you have to maneuver your ship through tricky areas while using your guns and shield to defend yourself from attack.

When we played this it was only for 2 players, and I think it expanded to 4 later. I feel like the game might be a little too easy with 4 players, since you could always have one person on piloting and one person on shields while the other two man the relevant guns at the time for wherever the enemies are coming from. For me, the joy of this game comes from managing it with a mere two people. You are always completely undermanned, and that makes the experience a more interesting one, because you can only ever pilot two of the modules at once - you always have to have one of the engines, shields, or guns completely unmanned. As a result, you need to make wise choices about when you want to stop and fight, and where you want to position the ship, or where you want to position the shield when you want to be mobile and fighting, or when you want to abandon guns and just retreat. And if you want to fire two guns, then you need to not be doing anything else. It doesn't take too much time to move between systems, but it takes enough time that there is a cost to doing so. This allows for a really fun co-op space where both players need each other to advance at all times, but can trade off what role they're doing at any time they please, as need demands.

It never gets overly stressful though. The game is challenging without being difficult, at least on the mode I played, and I think the appealing visual style helps a lot too. I saw a quote about how they decided to skip the "default gunmetal look", which I think was an incredibly wise decision, because the Katamari Damacy-like colorful visuals really add a lot. It's just an extremely appealing game to play and I'd recommend it to anyone who's looking for a fun, not-too-longish co-op campaign to play. I definitely want to show this game to other people at some point, and I hope Matt gets his ass back here so I can do more local co-op stuff like this with him.