Part co-op, part power-up, part Asteroids, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a game with an intriguing concept and a brilliant execution. When a friend of mine told me about it, he explained it as “four people operating a single space ship as they navigate a space filled with lasers, missiles, and as you’d probably expect, myriads of different kinds of creatures. Every ship has several different parts, including guns, engines, shields, etc. and each player can only operate one at a time, so you have to really work together to pull through.

When I heard about this game, I immediately thought it would be a hectic game in which every person will constantly be swapping between manning the guns, the engines, the shields, and whatever else may be demanded of them. But really, this isn’t that game. One person steering, one person with a shield, and two people managing all the different guns works just fine. The only thing that’s hectic is actually killing all the guys that are coming.

But the intrigue in this game is the power-ups. Because while there are only about four different kinds of stations a person can operate, there are three different power-ups you can find (Power, Beam, and Metal), and they all fundamentally change every station you put them on. Placing a Power gem on a gun will make it fire more bullets. Placing a Metal gem on a gun will change the weapon into a giant flail. Placing a Beam gem on a shield will make it deflect (rather than absorb) any bullets that hit it. There’s so many possibilities, and a lot of the fun in this game is looking for power-ups in order to utilize them in ways you haven’t seen yet.

This grows exponentially more exciting when you unlock upgrades that let you store two power-ups at each station. A Metal-Power gun will turn the gun into a giant missile launcher. A Metal-Metal gun will make the weapon have two flails! Since there’s so many different combinations of operating stations you can create with this game, it’s fun simply discovering those new things. There are, inevitably, ones that are better than others. I’m looking at you, Beam-Power engine and Beam-Metal shield. But that doesn’t make the discovery any less fun. As you progress into the game, you fight bosses, and eventually you can unlock new ships with different layouts.

Now, this game is up to four players, and we had five at the time, so for the majority of the time we were playing I sat out. But that didn’t actually diminish my experience. Since a lot of the fun is in the discovery, I got to experience all that alongside everybody else.

My biggest critique is that the discovery is sort of short-lived. I could have kept playing this game for several more hours, but I imagine this game will get stale after you’ve played it twice. You can only create so many types of enemies and terrain before it starts to get boring. I wanted to see even more discovery. Just one extra power-up. A Fire or Lightning gem, maybe. Now, I realize this is a tall order, given the number of combinations this would introduce would be insane, but since that’s where most of my entertainment came from, I think that should be a larger highlight of the game. This isn’t a puzzle game where co-op and perseverance is the only way to succeed. It’s not easy, but we never lost a single mission, and we were always playing on the hardest difficulty. So I want more ways to toy with the game interactions.

But beyond my insatiable need to have every game better than it is, this game is great. It’s loads of fun, and best of all it’s kid friendly. You’re rescuing space bunnies (often referred to as friends) as you go on an adventure literally mending a giant metal space heart.