This Means Warp is a survival cooperative game for 1-4 players – roguelite, which consists in managing a spaceship and conquering hostile galaxies. It is currently available in beta, and its developer, Jagex Ltd, is still developing it, patching and adding new features. The May update was really big: it introduced as many as 4 different gameplay scenarios, additional mini-games, new enemy ship layouts and many other changes. The developer is open to players’ comments and is eager to improve his product. If he’s reading reviews of the game, he might find a valuable suggestion or two here.
Heroes of space travels
We start the expedition with choosing a hero. We can be a human or a humanoid animal, and in time, even an alien from a hostile species. Characters differ in three parameters: shooting accuracy, speed and repair ability. When playing with several people, it is worth choosing different characteristics to later share the duties on the ship. During the game, the heroes reach new levels of development and we can choose which parameter we would like to improve. Additional characters can also be found in space – these will be bots that will be happy to join us as new crew members. Their recruitment will be crucial, especially in a solo game. We will be able to assign them priority tasks, such as firing a cannon, repairing a ship, extinguishing a fire or throwing bombs on an enemy ship. Unfortunately, the AI of our companions still requires a bit of refinement. I appreciate the fact that when they cannot go about their main task, they help us attack the enemy. It is a pity that they often sit us in our plot (even if they are assigned to the other one and it is fully operational and charged).
Destination – total destruction
In the standard scenario, we travel through the galaxy, destroying enemy ships and plundering the cosmos, sometimes we save survivors, and sometimes we burn small space creatures. Our main goal is to destroy the mother ship of the “bad” aliens (I still hope that we are the “good” ones, although in the end the story is not the most important thing for the game itself, and the most important thing here is a good “wreck” and expansion of our ship ). Despite the fixed pattern, each game is slightly different. Diversity is ensured by a mechanism of procedural generation of a space map along with the location of battlefields, loot or time tasks, as well as the arrangement of enemy ships. Permanent elements are some of the larger boss solutions. An example would be a space station, consisting of three parts, which countdown the time until the launch of large dangerous rockets and always press the button that changes the active side before its expiry. In some clashes, we have to take turns to fight once, and then repair the damage, e.g. on the aforementioned mother ship. It is very advantageous that when attacking bosses you sometimes have to adopt a certain strategy, and not just shoot them blindly.
Fight for life and death
Some players accuse the game of poor scalability, because we always start with a few simpler fights, and then suddenly find ourselves on an insurmountable ship. As the creators themselves write: the game is simple to understand but difficult to master. It mainly consists in the fact that from the very beginning we have to think strategically (especially about the expansion of the ship), and also quickly repair the damage that has been inflicted on us, because if we do not do it on time, they will stay permanently.
Luckily – from one of the updates – after losing, we can continue the game from where we left off (with an extensive ship and all the achievements we have achieved) and repeatedly approach the more difficult fight. However, if we start a solo game and then play multiplayer games, our first save will unfortunately be overwritten with the second one. In addition, the HP of our ship does not regenerate after reading the record, so sometimes we may have too little of it to be able to scroll anything. In this case, the only solution is to start the whole game from the beginning.
Fast fast…
An interesting diversion between fights are time mini-games, where we have to, for example, catch various small animals that appear on our ship or next to it, or make repairs quite vigorously while flying through an asteroid field.
The formula of continuous action in a hurry makes the game very exciting and fun when, for example, with other players we accidentally run into each other or accidentally put on a suit, trying to pick up something next to him.
