There are just some games that you play out there that regularly swing between being irritating and exciting in quick order, and those are some of the toughest to land on a score for. Hyperspaced, for my wife and I, was one such game. It started out pretty humbly, if anything feeling too simple, but then right after we started to get hooked, it tore us up a few times. Perhaps it was in that moment that we decided we needed to return the favor, grinding when we needed to, making our ship truly formidable, and then conquering the game’s last boss, only holding on by our fingernails. I wish that the experience was a little more consistent on the way there, and I do understand that this is a roguelike so that may be asking a lot, but if at the end you walk away satisfied I suppose you need to roll with that.

Feeling like a melding of ship-based combat in the vein of Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and ship maintenance in the mold of titles like Catastronauts, this roguelike certainly gives you plenty to try to keep an eye on. Given all of the distractions and complications you’ll run into, while you can manage to mostly play solo, at key moments the lack of some support will likely doom you on a consistent basis. The thing is, while more people can mean more help, it can also make for greater difficulties. For instance, while having a third crewmember was helpful, allowing someone to more consistently remain as gunner while another kept the ship from falling apart, it wasn’t all ideal. We thought that having two gunners in combat would make us more formidable, and it did from a firepower standpoint, but since the game honors basic physics that also meant piloting while multiple guns were firing in different directions was a very dicey proposition in anything resembling an enclosed space.

The thing is, as much as my wife and I really dug the game, and felt we had to beat it, there were absolutely pain points that needed more work. The first is simply that we didn’t understand the temporary nature of things like helper bots or some tools, so we kept wondering where they went. That issue was exacerbated by the fact that it was so easy to lose track of where the tools were, since they’re a bit too small and hard to spot on a regular basis… not great when you’re trying to fight an infestation. The fact that we had auto-fire weapons simply stop working, or prove pretty well ineffective, was also aggravating to run into more than once. While in the end we ended up needing every one of them in the final boss fight, we also had so many pills sitting around in the ship that our helper bots would get thrown off by them. It just feels like the in-ship systems were put in place and implemented at a some level, but proper thought and care wasn’t put into how they’d work over the course of the entire campaign. We were also underwhelmed by the new ships that were unlocked, and aggravated by the inability to move equipment from one ship to another to give them a proper test. These, and some others, were all irritants that we got over to some degree, but we did find ourselves cursing them periodically just because they generally felt like unforced errors.

So this is a case where, warts and all, I would still wholeheartedly recommend this game to people who are willing to put their relationships on the line for some intense co-op play. You’ll need to communicate, work out how everyone will adapt in specific crisis situations, and work together. As the perpetual pilot, my role tended to be the most constant, as the reprieve between swarms of enemies was typically pretty short. That meant that my wife had to regularly straddle being the gunner and engineer, fighting to prevent all of our cargo from being sucked out a broken window (you’ll learn to dread the sound of them cracking), and knowing when to quickly use some pills to prevent the ship from simply getting blasted apart. It did feel like once we got ahead of the curve we were able to ride too easily, with more resources to spend that we had things to buy, for the better part of 2 worlds, but I will admit that the final battle managed to take us to the brink multiple times… so despite wishing the experience wasn’t quite so uneven, I will admit that we were both challenged and entertained.