Sea of Thieves in space? Not quite, but Jump Ship replicates a lot of the things that make Rare's pirate sandbox so fun

My favorite co-op game of the past decade is Sea of Thieves: I love sailing a galleon into dangerous territory with friends, engaging in ship-to-ship and person-to-person (or skeleton) combat, then scampering off with loot. A game like Sea of Thieves, but in space? I'll definitely give it a try.

Jump Ship is a mission-based co-op FPS from Keepsake Games where you and up to three other crew members pilot a spaceship, engage in ship-to-ship battles and first-person combat, and salvage gear and goodies you can use to upgrade your ship. I recently got to try a hands-on preview, joined by PC Gamer's answer to Han Solo: Morgan Park. (I'm not sure if that makes me Luke or Chewbacca. Whoever has the worst aim, I guess.)

To be clear, Jump Ship isn't exactly Sea of Thieves in space. First off, it's a PvE-only game, so it doesn't have the unpredictability of other players showing up and trying to score your loot. And while Sea of Thieves is completely open world, Jump Ship is mission-based: you take a mission, then warp into a section of space to complete it. The missions do have a bit of an open world feel to them, in that when you enter a mission area you can choose how to accomplish your goals and in what order to face the threats, but it's not a seamless and unbroken open world like SoT.

But there's still quite a lot in common with Rare's pirate sandbox. One player can pilot the ship while another operates the weapons, and when you take damage someone can run around patching the ship up or putting out fires. It's also tactile in a way I appreciate: a lot of lootable items, like scrap metal and ship modules, have to be carried in both hands, so while you're lugging something around you have to drop it if you want to use a weapon. It makes the loot you deal with feel like real objects that need to be physically moved around, carried, and stored on shelves, rather than things that just exist as icons in an inventory slot.

It also makes the business of scavenging a shipwreck labor intensive, in a good way. One of our missions was to investigate and loot a wrecked ship drifting in space. After manually piloting our ship to the derelict vessel, we popped open our airlock and had to make several trips to collect everything, using our jet packs and grappling hooks to zip back and forth between the two hulls as fast as possible.

If a threat appeared, like an enemy ship spotting us or a turret on a nearby asteroid activating, it was a scramble to get back aboard and to battle stations before our ship got completely destroyed. That led to some comedy, too: at one point Morgan jumped into the pilot's seat and flew off in our ship while I was still hovering clumsily outside trying to find a damn airlock while holding a pile of scrap metal. Did Han Solo ever do that to Chewie?

On another segment of our mission, Morgan landed us on an asteroid and we ran through a darkened facility filled with enemy robots that chased us around while we collected batteries needed to power open a vault door. Again, the batteries were physical objects we needed to lift with both hands, so one person battled the bots while the other carried the battery. (At least we did that at first. Turned out the robots weren't that much of a threat and eventually we were just running and bunny-hopping as we each carried a battery.)

Thing is, I think leaving the ship behind to do on-foot missions is the least fun part of Jump Ship, because the ship itself is the best part of the game. It feels like a mobile base you can upgrade and tinker with, and we had to work hard to keep it in shape. When we got blasted by an enemy spacecraft, we'd sometimes receive a fire warning, so I had to leave the turret controls, grab a fire extinguisher, and run around the ship frantically putting out fires while Morgan continued flying. Dealing with crises on the ship feels hectic and fun as you coordinate with your crewmates about who is going to do what.

By the end of our mission we'd made our ship a pretty formidable one. We mounted a rail gun and some extra turrets onto the hull, we crafted a first-aid station from spare scrap we collected, and spent quite a bit of time trying to first figure and then optimize our ship's power supply. It's a little weird in that it's set up like a grid puzzle. Every element of the ship (guns, engines, shields) is a physical node with a different shape, and those nodes all need to fit onto the green sections of grid or they won't work. We eventually solved it by adding two new reactors to our ship, so the grid had so many green squares we could place all our nodes with room to spare.

I'm definitely interested in playing more of Jump Ship when it launches later this year: it was fun with two people and I can only assume it'd be twice as fun with a full crew of four. It's not Sea of Thieves in space, quite, but when one player is barrel rolling the ship and blasting away at enemies while the other is scrambling around putting out fires, it definitely has some of those great Sea of Thieves vibes.