Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, review: 'Not your standard space adventure game'

Developer/Publisher: Asteroid Base, £11.99, PC/PS4/Xbox One

Despite what the visuals, name, soundtrack and plot might suggest Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime isn’t your standard cutesy and simple space adventure game. It is actually a surprisingly challenging co-op focused crisis management style shooter.

The core premise of the game is that you inhabit a spacecraft with a companion (either AI or human) and must complete a series of levels where there are enemies to fight and pick-ups to be gathered. Seems simple enough, right? But what if I told you that to move the spacecraft one of you has to actually go to the helm and pilot the ship. Encounter an enemy? One of you will need to go and man one of the turrets.

This inability to carry out more than one action per player is both the game's core mechanic and, for me, one of its biggest annoyances. If you want to know where you are going someone has to go to the map room; if you want to use your shield someone has to go and aim it towards the danger.

When playing with a human companion there can be confusion and miscommunication which leads to you both going to the same turret as you get attacked from the other side of the ship. If you play with the AI you can tell your assistant where to go and then they will start shooting if you send them to a turret but they don’t do anything very well. This is really a problem once the levels start getting difficult, which they certainly do quite quickly, and you find yourself dying repeatedly. I just wish movement had been possible in addition to another one of the tasks.

Perhaps it’s just my age leading to a declining level of skill but by the time I had got the hang of the awkward aspects of the mechanics the game was almost over and I had suffered through multiple levels of frustration.

That said there was clearly something to this game that made me get through it in almost one sitting. There are regular upgrades to the weapons and the art style is a nice change from the boring browns and greys of most modern sci-fi shooters. Best of all though was the satisfaction when both pilots were working together in unison and really kicking butt, unfortunately for me, this took too long to come.

Worth a go if you have a relationship you want to test or enjoy seeing a cat in a space helmet.