I can always tell if I have enjoyed a game by how long it takes me to stop playing and write the review. This Means Warp is developed by Outlier Games and Published by Jagex Limited. Oh, and I really should’ve had this reviewed a while back…

“It’s co-op space survival fun, Jim, but not as we know it. This Means Warp is an intense spaceship management roguelite experience for 1-4 players. Explore a procedurally generated universe, upgrade your ship, battle dangerous enemies and adapt your strategies to survive in a hostile galaxy.”

This Means Warp is a roguelite and honestly, that’s enough to get me distracted because the roguelite sub-genre is a favourite of mine. The short version of this review is that this game is pretty damn great. The long version? Well, it’s longer.

You start out by naming your ship and selecting a scenario to play. You then pick your captain from a small selection of characters. Each of these characters have three stats; attack, repair and movement speed. The starting stats differ between the characters and they can be upgraded as you play too. You then get a pretty straight-forward tutorial to get you up to speed,

The basic aim is to explore a randomly generated area of space, one square at a time. The squares will usually have some kind of action and most of that action will see you doing battle with an enemy ship. The aim is to destroy the enemy before they destroy you. By controlling your gun(s), you can aim at set points of the opposing ship. Do you try to disable their guns, blow open walls to suck out the oxygen or maybe try to destroy their ammo supplies? This gives the game a tactical edge as you can pick and choose what to attack and when. Personally, I like to destroy one of their guns, then when someone comes along to repair it, shoot a wall next to them and watch them get sucked out to space. As just mentioned, damage can be repaired and tactics play a huge part.

Of course, as you are trying to take out the enemy, they are trying to do the same to you. If they take out your gun(s), you’ll have to stop to repair them, which means you’re no longer attacking. They too can blow the walls of your ship open and you’ll have to repair those too. This can make battles a real tug of war thing as the balance of power can shift multiple times during  a scrap.

You’ll start the game with a crew of one… you (in single-player), but as you explore the area, you can find new crew members to help you out. You’ll also find loot, upgrades and such. When you clear a map (which does end in a boss battle), you can move into a warp and onto the next area. In between areas, you’ll stop off at a shop where you can buy new weapons and such. You’ll need to keep your ship one step ahead of the enemy.

There are offensive and defensive upgrades to manage. Do you go for a missile launcher to do some damage, or do you go for a shield upgrade to help keep your ship in working order? Juggling between offense and defence becomes a strategy and coupled with the tug of war nature of the battles, you get a pretty deep game with a lot to keep an eye on. That’s before I get into the smaller upgrades that you can find and apply to any of your weapons. Find a + damage and fix it to one of your guns. There are health upgrades to give your weapons a better chance against enemy fire and more.

Let’s not forget that this is a roguelite and yes, you will die… a lot. But you earn EXP every run and when you level up, you’ll unlock new weapons, both offense and defence, new characters to play as and there’s even a nice selection of hats to wear. The procedurally generated maps mean that you never know what to expect, this also carries over to the weapon and upgrade drops. You can have one run where luck goes your way and you end up with a relatively easy ride. Other times and luck will stick its middle finger up at you and you’ll barely get past the first boss fight. Plus there is the option of playing in co-op either online or locally. This game is tip-top fun with a few friends and offers a lot of game to play.

I did find a few annoyances with This Means Warp. When you start a new run, it plays the opening cutscene. You can manually skip it. It then gives you the option of playing or skipping the tutorial. This is the thing about the roguelite sub-genre and the nature of you having to play multiple runs over and over and over… you really don’t need to see the opening cutscene after every single run. You really don’t need to choose to play or skip the tutorial after every single run. You just want to get back into the action with as little faff as possible. Instead of the option to manually skip the opening cutscene and the tutorial, there should be an option to just switch them off completely. Just let us get back into the action after every run.

Playing on the Xbox and on a pretty big TV, the text is too damn small. This is a common issue with games that work great on the PC but when ported to consoles, we need a bigger font because the screen is not right in front of us. Just to test, I streamed from my Xbox to my laptop and it was perfect. I could read every word. But playing natively on a TV, the font is very tiny and very difficult to read. I think that adding a font size option would be great because reading the text and stats of the weapons is pretty damn important. The final gripe I have is that the AI for the other crew members is very hit and miss. Sometimes the AI is pretty damn competent and they’ll go and repair the ship when it needs repairing. Other times they’ll just walk right in front of a destroyed wall and get sucked into space, or they’ll do something really unimportant while your ship is taking heavy damage.

Priced at around £16 and out now for PC and all of the consoles. If you are a roguelite fan, then This Means Warp is a must-buy. Aside from the niggles that I found (which I hope will be patched), this is great to play. Even better in co-op and it offers a firm but fair and balanced challenge for a roguelite. To break out the clichés, this is one of those ‘easy to play, hard to master’ titles and one that most definitely has that ‘one more go’ aspect. The fact that I really should’ve had this review done about a week ago, but couldn’t pull myself away from playing it is a great sign.