There’s a unique kind of excitement you get from a really good early access game – it’s not just “this is fun”, it’s also, “imagine how much more fun this could get.” Jump Space meets the criteria.

Drawing from a melting pot of influences as wide as Sea of Thieves, Left 4 Dead, Helldivers 2, FTL, and even a touch of Resident Evil inventory management, Jump Space emerges as a game all its own – a rolling series of action-packed missions that ask you and your friends to cope with constantly shifting objectives and needs.

For each round, you’ll assemble a crew at a hub (using the party leader’s personal spaceship), gear up, and choose a mission together – but the key here is that your core objective is an endgoal, not the be-all-and-end-all. Each mission will generate what amounts to a roguelike map of stops along the way. That title, Jump Space, is the clue: you’re taking your ship on a series of faster-than-light trips across the galaxy to reach your mission.

Each stop might feature enemies to fight, resources to collect, or secrets to uncover – your goal is to get as strong (and take as little damage) as possible before you reach your final destination.

But it’s in the thick of the action that Jump Space shows how far it could go. Even the most basic starter ship comes with multiple stations to deal with – your crew will need a pilot, a gunner, someone to run engineering (every system and upgrade on the ship is a physical object, and needs to be plugged into your power grids to function) and, often, someone to simply fight off intruders. Flitting between these roles is entirely seamless – sit in the pilot seat, and you’ll switch to a view of the ship – get out of it, and you’re back on the bridge.

Even more impressive is that you’re by no means stuck within your ship – you can head to an airlock (or, even more fun, an ejection tube) and enter deep space at any time. Perhaps you’ve had an alert that mines have been attached to your hull? Get out of the ship, magnetize your boots to the outside, and get clearing. Up against a vessel you simply can’t deal with in ship-to-ship combat? Park behind an asteroid and blast out, using your jetpacks to board and cripple it from within.

Inspired by Left 4 Dead, developer Keepsake Games have created an “AI Director” that will shift the parameters as you hit each mini-mission – if you’re doing poorly, it might ease up a little, and if you’re breezing past areas, it might send in an armada to put you to the test.

It means that even simple-sounding tasks can become wild action sequences – you stop in an asteroid field, using your ship scanner to locate resources (your in-game currency is used not just to buy things, but to craft items and perform repairs, meaning you constantly need to accrue it), but find that automated turrets are scattered throughout the area. Suddenly, you’re all simultaneously flying to find a safe space, trying to put out fires in your ventilation system, blasting out to collect the goods, and violently removing turrets from your path.

And this is before you reach the mission you came here to do. In my demo of the game, we’d been sent to provide support for an allied ship under attack. But it wasn’t just a case of fighting off other ships – instead, we needed to fend off a wave, head out of the ship to a series of factory installations, take down robots in tense FPS combat, deactivate their systems, then head back to our ship to tackle newly-arrived threats elsewhere. There’s simply no downtime, making each run an adrenaline-fuelled series of reactions to whatever new problem needs solving.

And when you do finally get a breather, completing your mission and blasting back home, your rewards can be used to unlock new upgrades, new weapons, new gadgets, and whole new ships – each one tempting you back into space to try them out.

Even in its earliest form, it’s a loop that begs you to have one more go – not to mention one that opens so many doors for Keepsake to add more ideas to the mix. I have a feeling I’ll be returning again and again to see what’s new.