Jumplight Odyssey (PC) Preview

As colorful and anime-inspired as can be, League of Geeks’ Jumplight Odyssey is a true standout among the many games shown off this year during what is only loosely called faux-E3. Drenched in 80s anime and the hope of 90s Star Trek, the look can be different from the action itself. Along with the story of Princess Euphora, I have previously said Jumplight Odyssey seemed to be FTL meets Theme Hospital/Evil Genius with a touch of Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress. Launching into Early Access yesterday, FTL: Strange New Worlds tries to push away some of those comparisons by having its own style too.

With only two of the four planned gameplay modes, you can pick between Euphora’s tale or create your own. However, in essence, you’ll always be running from the Zutopans to safety. Aside from slamming on the spacebar to pause time, that’s about it for the comparison to FTL and everything else is more along the lines of a colony sim for the most part. You’ll be collecting resources, preparing for battle with the oncoming war behind you, and sending out research or combat missions. There’s also the one comparison I didn’t think I’d be making, keeping the morale high so we’re not killing each other and cooking legs over the jumplight reactor.

Keeping things basic, with four materials you create four things to keep the SDF Catalina and her crew from descending into madness and the clutches of Admiral Voltan. Some resources like biomass are used to make other resources like medigel, but we’ll get to that in a moment. There is also a sort of ticking clock element alongside the slowly encroaching Zutopan threat, as power and water will only last so long. However, you can burn fuel (biomass) to extend your power and your power is also used to generate extra water. Then we come to our captain and her four officers: The command that will give you objectives beyond saving the people.

Your adventure starts in The Regency sector, going through the Mineral Ring, a nebula and that thing a bloke named William thinks is still active despite Fergie’s departure. Then you make it to Edge Space, and eventually the Forever Star. Jumplight Odyssey also starts with a tutorial that is aimed at giving you the basics of what to do, and arguably that’s all it aims to do. The biomass I mentioned before is a little more complicated than it first seems. You get different types of biomass, which is fine, but when you first set up your greenhouse in the tutorial it is algae, which isn’t edible but is great for medigel.

A large number of things to construct or repair on the ship also require your plastic extractor to work. To repair that you need the metal extractor working, which requires power and that means building and maintaining the power station. Then you need the materials. My point here is, there are a large number of loops that you have to remember, many of which you aren’t aware of until they are a problem. Going in completely blind, you wouldn’t know these things. That is where I think the tutorial present in the press build (and possibly the early access launch) fails to really do its job.

Coming in expecting it to be like the 90s management games you grew up on will cause you to be dissatisfied, as that isn’t the point. You are effectively playing as the captain, giving commands down the chain. When (for example) the materials aren’t coming fast enough for your metal extraction, the engineer working on the machine gets bored and wanders off. Meanwhile, your supplies officer is tracking down the next guy that’s filling the input of the extractor. All of which is to say, there is a lot of management but micromanagement and minion slapping isn’t on the cards. The latter is especially annoying when pathing doesn’t work.

Despite being a little buggy out of the gate, the core of Jumplight Odyssey is still there though it can be frustrating. Returning to the point I was making about the metal extractor because it is something I just can’t let go of, I wasn’t producing the metal fast enough. Despite setting the hauling of resources as a high priority, nothing was moving fast enough. Because there weren’t materials in the extractor, the engineer decided to walk off and pick his underwear out of his bum crack. Then, due to the aforementioned pathing issues which are noted in the “press guide,” they sometimes got stuck climbing into or out of the chair of the machine.

When pathing/bugs aren’t inhibiting not only progress but survival, I think Jumplight Odyssey is great. It brings all that frustration of running a ship to the front of its gameplay loops, for better and worse. It tries to bring micromanagement to your little ship of anime characters but does not really give you the hands to strangle them when they walk up to the job they are supposed to be doing and proceed to walk away.

The building mechanics are simple enough and give you the same freedom to do almost as you please, similar to the Theme/Two Point Hospital of previous years. Though they seemingly require a lot more of a utilitarian mindset for your dumb little people. From time to time, I’ve been told that my placement of shelves was wrong because the stupid people I have in my crew can’t work out that a shelf next to another shelf means standing in front of it to get what you want. Though they are really picky about that one.

I wish I could tell you that the controls are actually simple, but for the life of me, between holding Ctrl and scrolling or using the up and down arrow keys to move between decks and camera movement, I’ve forgotten almost everything else. Square brackets (these > []) change the time scale. Oh, and of course left-click selects, holding right-click down moves you around, and after you’ve selected anything and want to back out you just right-click anywhere else. I would go into the controls within the options to get a breakdown or possibly change those bindings, but you can’t.

The options overall are rather limited, including display though given the stylized art I can see why. That said, I’ve not only had frame rate issues but downright crashes and abysmal frame rates hitting as low as 11 frames per second. As I keep going over in multiple reviews/previews, looking over the system requirements listed, my system either equals or surpasses all of the requirements in the recommended list. For the time being, users with lower-end hardware might want to avoid Jumplight Odyssey while it is in Early Access, or at least until some of the performance issues are settled.

Jumplight Odyssey is mostly there. I’d argue that it is the technical side that needs the most attention at the moment. The frustration beyond trying to run away from the Zutopan fleet comes from fighting the crew to do their jobs without somehow inferring the wrath of low frame rates or outright crashes. I want to keep playing more, and I want to try different things to hold off the oncoming war. Sadly, that buggy nature and sometimes really unpleasant performance puts pay to that rather quickly.

Ultimately, though Jumplight Odyssey makes my Star Trek fan heart flutter a little faster (I should see Julian about that) it very quickly becomes style-over-substance thanks to a couple of bugs or design options. I’d have liked the tutorial to go a little bit more in-depth to give you a sense of all the loops you have to concern yourself about, instead of hand-waving you away to figure it out on your own. League of Geeks has found a way of giving you the sense of a captain in a hectic run for their and their crew’s lives. However, the lack of direct hands-on command can and will annoy some looking for something a little more unrestrained.

A PC preview copy of Jumplight Odyssey was provided by League of Geeks for this review.