With 1 million wishlists, Jump Space is the next breakout co-op success, and it's hitting every wild space fantasy you could ever have

A lot of things happened in my demo for Jump Space, the co-op space shooter that became one of the standout winners of the latest Steam Next Fest. But by far the coolest was grappling across the vastness of space to board a flaming energy fighter, and then leaping back into the void before it exploded to guide myself safely home with my jetpack. Lots of other cool things happened too - which probably explains why Jump Space has racked up more than a million wishlists ahead of its launch next month - but I was already sold by then.

A PvE co-op game, Jump Space (known as Jump Ship until an 11th-hour copyright claim terrified the team) tasks your crew of up to four players with fighting and flying your way across a series of space-faring missions. Each campaign is made up of a series of skirmishes; some take place entirely aboard your ship, others entirely planetside, and others still requiring take-off and landing as they move between the two. The missions themselves are not particularly complex - kill some bad guys, recover some loot - but the freedom with which Jump Space lets you tackle them is what sets it apart.

Hyper space

Aboard your ship, your team's responsibilities are determined by where you sit. The pilot's seat tackles navigation, the gunner takes control of various weapons mounted at various points upon your hull. In my three-person crew, that left one player in charge of maintenance - repairing damaged components, putting out fires, and crafting ammo. But that's not just busywork. Firefighting duty, for example, requires actually spacewalking with an extinguisher and tackling individual flames. In a particularly hairy dogfight, you might need someone to quickly divert power around the ship, making use of a modular power system that can be tweaked to your liking.

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For developer Keepsake Games, that's all about making sure to deliver on your spacefaring fantasy. If that fantasy is yelling 'direct all power to the engines' from the pilot's seat, then someone on board can actually make that happen. If that fantasy is sniping an enemy fighter out of the sky from a mounted gunner's seat, you can take advantage of individual weapons to get your kicks. And if that fantasy is organizing a boarding party to take the fight to the enemy on their own turf, you can run out of the airlock and grapple straight to the enemy.

I'm not afraid to say I did an awful lot of that in my Jump Space demo. The real highlight was leaping free of my own craft, superhero-landing on the hull of an enemy ship, and then stealing a critical component to leave it listing aimlessly in space while our gunner took it out. By that point, of course, I was well on my way to safety, my grapple whirring away as it towed me home.

It offered an astonishing level of freedom, even as we navigated a simple campaign on a starter ship. I could scarcely believe just how much I could get away with, even as I stood atop the burning hull of that unfortunate fighter I mentioned earlier. There's so much freedom to tackle spaceflight however you like that I was almost sad to have to put my spaceboots back on solid ground - firing shotgun bolts at an army of angry robots would feel great in any other context, but there was no way it could measure up to what I'd been doing in space just minutes before.

I came away deeply impressed by Jump Space, and while it passed me by during Steam Next Fest because I couldn't get a group together to play it quick enough, it's immediately apparent why it got so much attention. It's already proved to be so much fun that I can genuinely see myself putting just as much real brain energy into even its nerdiest features, like ship manifests and power routing, as into pulling off the perfect grapple-jetpack-boarding party combo. And with Keepsake promising players will be "pleasantly surprised" when it comes to price, I think Jump Space could catch the devs of several much bigger, weightier space games resting on their laurels.

Space isn't the final frontier as there's a lot of games about it! Check out our best space games if you want to discover more.