Spaceship roguelike "Jumplight Odyssey" is an animated and exciting FTL

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Spaceship roguelike "Jumplight Odyssey" is an animated and exciting FTL

We get our first glimpse of Jumplight Odyssey's combat in a new trailer premiered at the PC Gaming Show 2023. The roguelike spaceship colony sim was unveiled last year with a suitably raucous story trailer, but as the new trailer reveals, it's not just bucktooth pigs and accidental fire hazards you'll be dealing with as you lead your crew through the stars.

You will likely spend a lot of time fighting off the invading Zootopan fleet (led by the wonderfully theatrically named Admiral Voltan) and preparing various defensive measures. Blast doors must be activated, passages locked, and crew members ordered (literally) to change into their combat gear before operating the defense turrets. Starfighters must be scrambled to intercept incoming enemy ships and combat divisions must be rallied to board enemy units.

Ultimately, though, you want to charge up your jumplight engines as quickly as possible and leave the battlefield in a rainbow-fueled burst of light speed. Unsurprisingly, 1970s science fiction adventure anime series (such as Space Battleship Yamato) have had a major influence on the Jumpright Odyssey.

The Zapp Brannigan-style narration is a nice touch, giving the game a Futurama flavor. However, while the spaceship-building portion of the game appears to be inspired by management and colony sims, the combat takes a different direction. [Developer and League of Geeks co-founder Trent Kusters told PC Gamer last year, "It's basically a rogue-lite colony sim. It's like FTL and Two Point Hospital added together and divided by two, with a little bit of RimWorld added in for some story generation. You jump from star system to star system, repairing your ship in the process, modifying it for a particular star system, and harvesting resources so you can make the next jump quickly to escape Zootopan and head to Forever Star. [You can prove it when the free demo of Jumplight Odyssey is released on June 19 as part of Steam Next Fest. Then we might even find out what that toothy pig is all about.

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