Catastronauts

As the couch co-op renaissance continues to gather pace, Inertia Game Studios has delivered a sci-fi party game that drops teams of players in a fight for survival against alien adventures. You start the story mode as a rookie space cadet and learn the basics of combat and key actions such as extinguishing fires, all through a short tutorial. During your graduation ceremony, your mustachioed captain is abducted by a fleet of evil space creatures that are out for revenge after escaping from star prison. Therefore, it's up to you and your crew to rescue your superior and protect your space fleet and the planet Earth from this group of intergalactic convicts. The characters in Catastronauts garble in a comical fashion similar to Banjo Kazooie and we always looked forward to each encounter with the alien's leader as he would often taunt us and refer to us as 'squishies'.

The goal of each stage in Catastronauts is to destroy the attacking enemy ship - whittling its health bar down by bombarding it with lasers and missile fire. You play with up to three players and the carnage feels similar to Overcooked in that its tasks are forever mounting up and you're always on the brink of a slip-up. You will have to work cooperatively with your teammates using repair kits and extinguishers to patch up sustained damage as well as loading weapons ready for firing. We often found ourselves yelling at our teammates especially when, for example, we found that the fire extinguisher we desperately needed was inaccessible on the other side of a teleporter.

As the story progresses the stages become more difficult and they introduce new mechanics and ship layouts to keep things feeling fresh. Some of the later stages include revolving doors, teleporters, and awkward item placement to ramp up the challenge. Some of the late game mechanics require you to rush into a panic room to avoid an impending storm and throw rogue mines off the edge of the ship before they explode. Your ship's arsenal also varies, with some weapons overheating and exploding if held down too long and others requiring that you charge their batteries. These inclusions help to keep a relatively simple and familiar concept feel fresh across its total of seven main stages.

Playing Catastronauts is a co-op focussed affair, and thus going solo isn't anywhere near as fun. It features local co-op only meaning that you won't be able to team up with buddies online if you just have the one controller. When we tried to progress alone we hit a wall as early as the second set of stages, as things felt too stressful and chaotic. Having to repair the ship, load and fire the weapons, and occasionally pause to retreat to the safety of the panic room just felt too much and we wish an AI-controlled second player could have been added. You can easily switch between players by pushing R1/RB and we were told that the difficulty is supposed to scale to the number of players, but it's still something we wouldn't recommend.

We've played both the PlayStation and Xbox One versions and we found both to handle smoothly for quick and accessible play. The square button (on PS4) can be pressed and held to complete most of the tasks such as using teleporter switches, firing lasers, and repairing the ship. The only other controls besides this are the left analog stick (to move around) and the X button (to pick up various tools). Younger players and those who don't play a lot of video games should find the control scheme easy to pick up and we took to it instinctively.

The main incentive for players to return to stages in Catasronauts is to improve upon their star rating. You can earn up to three stars and your rating is dependent on how quickly you finish a stage and how much damage you sustain during combat. The other incentive to return to is, of course, to play stages quickly with friends within a party situation. As this is the case we wish that there was some form of quickplay mode available as the only way to select stages at present is a little too cumbersome. As a party title, accessibility is important and that's something that Overcooked nailed right out of the gate.

Catastronauts may stumble when it comes to delivering an engaging single-player mode but it still packs in hours of multiplayer fun and arrives as a worthy rival to its largest influence, Overcooked. We loved how Inertia Game Studios was able to expand on the simple premise in creative ways, adding new ship layouts, weapons, and hazards for us to overcome. The aforementioned single-player mode can prove to be quite stressful and we do wish there some form of a quickplay mode implemented for more accessible adventures, but these faults are minor at best. If you are looking for a cute and addictive party game (possibly as an alternative to Super Mario Party this October) we'd certainly recommend giving Catastronauts a look.