CHENNAI : In my experience, cooperative games don’t get as much love as competitive games. The two main reasons I’ve heard for this are that they’re too easy, or that they’re too prone to being ‘quarterbacked’ — that is, where one player starts telling everybody else at the table how they should play. How about an extremely tough co-op, then, where you simply can’t spare the time to order teammates about because you’re trying to figure out what you’re capable of doing yourself?
In Space Alert, you and your friends play the crew of a spaceship who’ve been tasked with the job of jumping into hostile sectors to scan them, dealing with the inevitable threats that’ll show up, and hyperspacing out again after your scans are complete. Sounds simple, but it really isn’t. First up, your ship…doesn’t exactly have the most convenient layout, and bits will just straight up stop working at times. (It is called the ‘Lame Duck’, which should’ve been a clue.) Secondly, you have to do the above in ten minutes, because this is a real-time game.
Space Alert provides audio tracks for each mission (either on CDs in the box, or available for download for the website). These will tell you when to draw additional threat cards, and which zone to put them in. While the tracks are playing, everybody at the table is trying to program their actions by playing cards into particular slots on your board. For example, you might fire the starboard lasers at T+3 (the third ‘turn’ after the start of the game), which means somebody will need to have charged them up by then. So you do this for ten minutes until the audio track ends, which is when you go back and replay your actions from the beginning to see if you actually survived long enough to make it out. If you do, you win.
Space Alert is best described as a headless-chicken simulator. That’s how you’ll be running around the ship, trying to do too many things at once. This is the most genuinely stressful game I’ve ever played, but what saves it is that it’s also frankly hilarious. Elevators let you travel between the upper and the lower deck, but only one person can fit into them at a time; so you will run into slapstick comedy routines where two of you get stuck in the elevator. There’s also the fact that you get points by taking the time to look out of the window, because your scanners are bad enough that visual confirmation is required.
The audio track will occasionally just devolve into static loud enough that you can’t hear each other, which is meant to simulate a communications breakdown; another brilliant touch in a game packed with them.
Perhaps my favourite part of Space Alert is the ship’s computer. Each game is divided into three phases, and in each phase, someone must head over to the computer and ‘move the mouse’. The reason? If you don’t, the screensaver will come on and all ship facilities will temporarily stop working. If that isn’t genius, I don’t know what is.
Reading this far, you probably already know if this is a game for you. And it’s not for everybody, make no mistake. If you like completely stress-free games, or if you prefer rather more sober gaming, you should look elsewhere. If you’re down for a little cooperative chaos though, Space Alert is one of the best games out there.