Jump Ship Plays Like a Mix of Sea of Thieves, Left 4 Dead, and FTL

Every once in a while, my job affords me the wonderful opportunity to go into a game demo completely blind and come out completely enlightened. All I knew about Jump Ship before I met with three of its ten-person Swedish development team – including Daniel Kaplan, who was employee #1 at Mojang, and Filip Coulianos, a cofounder at Hazelight – was that it was codenamed Hyperspace and that it would be “a four-player co-op adventure where you and three of your friends get to live the ultimate space fantasy.” It started as a tech demo but everyone loved it so now it’s being made into a full game. I was fortunate enough to play a 30-minute session with Kaplan, Coulianos, and another member of Keepsake Games, and I was blown away.

The headline you clicked on to get into this article is not hyperbole: by Keepsake’s own definition – and one that I’d co-sign after playing the game for myself – Jump Ship is a clear mix of Sea of Thieves, Left 4 Dead, and FTL. The Sea of Thieves piece comes from the fact that you and your three teammates all work together to fly, upgrade, customize, and maintain a single spaceship. One of you flies it, while the others can wander around inside of it or even on the outside of it if you pass through an airlock and then use your magnetized boots to stomp around the hull, manning, fixing, or upgrading the ship’s cannons. That in and of itself is fun.

And even if Jump Ship was just “Sea of Thieves in Space,” where you and your crew cooperated in ship-to-ship battles, it’d still probably be pretty cool. But you’ll also land your ship, use your Jet Drive to awesomely fly through the air like Superman away from or towards your ship, go into instanced combat areas, and battle AI enemies – Jump Ship is a purely PvE game, marking one major difference from Sea of Thieves – in encounters that can get pretty tough, thus necessitating cooperation with your pals. Add in that an AI “director,” to use Valve’s term, dynamically populates these encounters, and you can see where the Left 4 Dead ingredient in Jump Ship’s recipe comes from. I had a fantastic time blasting bots with the Keepsake developers.

Finally, FTL. On board your ship, you’ll manage power conduits and other ship functions in an FTL-esque minigame (which, sadly, I don’t have footage of). All of it combines into a moment-to-moment that’s never dull and constantly evolving. Just when you get bored of manning the ship (assuming you’re not the pilot, which is super fun by the way), it’s time to land and go into full first-person shooter mode. And when you’ve got your loot reward and are escaping and being blasted at as your ship departs, you’re scrambling to make necessary repairs to your ship, like a Star Trek crew.

You can choose any number of mission types from your ship map, from smaller, loot-lite payoffs that won’t take too long to longer, multi-part episodes that have bigger rewards. Keepsake promises a meta game that will enable various forms of permanent character and ship progression, but naturally I didn’t have a chance to see those in my short hands-on session. Still, I’ve seen enough to be thoroughly convinced. Jump Ship is going to take us through crazy space battles, dogfights in the skies of planets, intense on-foot missions on the ground, and more – all while working together with three friends in ways that feel fun and useful without being frustrating.

Kaplan and Coulianos told me it’s going to ship simultaneously on PC and Xbox whenever it’s finally ready, and I can’t wait.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.