Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime...........................
Matt Elliott boldly goes where no man has gone before… a harmonious, monogamous space-based relationship that kicks alien butt.
A frantic, cutesy space-romping love affair with lasers that you can play alongside either a cute computer-controlled puppy or kitten, or a real life ugly human. We’re not sure why anyone would opt for the latter, but each to their own.
LoversinaDangerousSpacetime succeeds by asking you to do too much with too little. In your spacecraft, sliced in half like a peach, eight rooms serve different functions. One controls the engines, another the shields. The four gun turrets cover only limited areas. Crucially, you have just two crew members, so much of your time is spent dashing around, dealing with enemies that appear on every side. In this jittery future of love, lasers and intergalactic travel, the ladder is king.
If you’re alone, an AI pet helps out – Doppler the dog or Kepler the cat – but they can’t handle the complicated business of piloting. It may be easiest to leave them in charge of shields by default, and send them to the guns when required. However you manage it, you can rarely relax.
Lovers really comes alive when played with a human partner. Here you can instruct, argue, blame and forgive – all elements which make two-player games amazing, even if it’s local co-op only. When you play alone, an already exacting challenge can sometimes become disheartening. Although your AI companions are generally reliable, floating down the wrong path can lead to a swift death and the loss of 10 minutes’ progress. Failure is frustrating – especially when there’s no option to quickly restart – but you never really feel stuck, only temporarily delayed.
Gameplay feels great. Your ship slides about reluctantly like a puppy on a polished floor. Gentle thrusts push you in one direction, and you can spin the engines around to nudge yourself through tight honeycomb tunnels. Lasers fizz, projectiles boing off trampoline shields. Your organisational skills are tested further by the Yamota super-weapon, which rotates around the circumference of your ship like the second hand on the Doomsday Clock. It’s thunderously effective when timed correctly, but risky. Simply waiting for it to tick into position leaves you exposed for desperate seconds – enough to fatally scupper your ship.
Your shields, engine and weapons can be upgraded by adding gems. You start out naked, but by the end of each section you resemble a booby-trapped meatball, spewing out twinkling caltrops and smashing enemy craft with your cosmic bommy-knocker. Eventually, you can add multiple gems to each station, which allows for pleasingly varied combinations.
Love and rockets
Mixing metal and beam gems on a turret creates a wrecking ball that shoots lasers in three directions; the same combination on the engine sends you lurching forward on jets of light, leaving lines of fiery metal in your wake. You can also unlock new ships, eg the Banana Split limits crew members to specific rooms, like bickering lovers in a divided flat.
Generally, your goal is to pootle through each randomly generated level rescuing imprisoned animals. However, some levels force you to survive waves of increasingly dangerous enemies with a delicate hyper-drive that can’t be repaired once damaged. In another particularly tricky stage, unruly gunfire will break open eggs full of snapping aliens, so you have to change tactics completely, creeping through and carefully picking your shots. There’s variation everywhere. Some enemies are coated in icy armour, which has to be shot off with gouts of fire from nearby stars; elsewhere, watery undercurrents drag you in circles. Each section also ends with a boss battle. These don’t offer the same reactive challenge as the normal stages, but they’re a fun way of celebrating big guns and orderly cooperation.
Lovers isn’t long – you could easily get through it in around six hours – but diversity and some sticky difficulty spikes make it feel like a neatly plotted, distinguished adventure.