Jumplight Odyssey is a tantalizing colony sim if you can get past the bugs

Now here’s a game I didn’t know I needed. Space colony management sims aren’t exactly a rare breed, even after you cross them with survival elements. However, I never realized that the one thing they were missing was the SDF-1.

Jumplight Odyssey bases itself on ‘80s sci-fi anime and does it with such incredible pizzazz and with such elegant depth that I’m absolutely stunned by the result. It feels like a missing Macross game, a title that bases itself not around the war going on but on the survivors aboard the SDF-1 as they cling to hope in the direst of circumstances. It is an exciting development by the team behind Armello.

Now, if only I could play it without getting hindered by bugs.

Hope springs eternal

I want to be clear that Jumplight Odyssey is simply going into Early Access on August 21, 2023. That’s still over a week away, and after that, bug fixes are part of the path to Early Access. I have total faith that League of Geeks will be able to squash the biggest issues in short order, but I certainly had my share of issues with the pre-release.

But let’s put that aside for now.

Jumplight Odyssey has you managing a starship that is fleeing from an aggressive alien army. The crew’s homeworld has been destroyed, and their only hope is to reach “The Forever Star” on the far reaches of space. Currently, the only captain available is Princess Euphora, the last regent of the destroyed planet. Your only choice of ship is the SDF Catalina. It’s pretty clear that League of Geeks plans to add more captains and ships, but for now, we’ve only got one of each. That’s more than enough as a start.

The Catalina starts off in functional but damaged condition. Your first order of business is to get everything functioning again. Don’t get too comfortable, though. The Zutopans are right on your tail. As you work, energy is passively gathered by your jumplight drive. You need to make sure your course is plotted, keep one eye on the enemy position, and keep jumping to further star systems to stay ahead of the enemy.

Bravely ran away, away

You also need to keep your crew alive. This means not only enabling the production of food and water but also keeping their morale up and gathering supplies from the planets you stop at. You choose missions and send off teams to bring back resources and other survivors. Crew members are also assigned to various teams, which you’ll need to balance as they’re required. There are combat, science, engineering, and supplies. Poor supply people. They just lift things.

You also need to defend yourself in Jumplight Odyssey, which I never really got to the point of having to do. Yeah, see, the bugs started cropping up pretty early for me.

My first attempt kept on getting stopped by things just not working right. One time, the last regent crammed herself against one of the shuttles, and everybody else chose to follow her. I think they were trying to unload it. Quitting to the main menu and reloading fixed everyone’s brain.

I then had an instance where the ship was running out of energy, but no one would man the generators. I told the crew to prioritize the delivery of supplies to them, but no one showed up to turn that biomatter into fuel. Eventually, the lights started going out, and someone came around to unload the stored biomatter. Okay, I guess we’re just giving up.

Knees aren’t supposed to bend that way

But the worst was trying to start a new game. On the default Catalina quest, if you don’t start with the tutorial, it doesn’t leave you a lot of time to gain jumplight fuel and warp to the next star system. It also doesn’t give you enough composite to build an item that makes jumplight fuel generate faster.

I realize that I could just start a custom journey and give myself more resources to start. Otherwise, I could play the tutorial again. But there are just too many headaches right now.

This is unfortunate, because I’m really excited about Jumplight Odyssey. The whole reason I took a chance with it was because I really liked Armello, a previous game by League of Geeks. I wasn’t sure if I’d like another attempt at space colony management, but once I got into it, I was in awe of how much there was to dig into and how accessible it was made to be.

However, right now, the bugs kill that accessibility. Once again, I have no doubt that they’ll get fixed. While there are a lot of interface tweaks I want to see happen, none of the bugs seem beyond fixable, so I have faith that they’ll get addressed. However, right now, I’m just going to be watching my Steam client for when updates start dropping. As it stands, I wholeheartedly recommend Jumplight Odyssey. It might just be a good idea to wait a little while before diving in.