This Means Warp Review

Overview

This Means Warp takes two entirely different games and violently mashes them together until they kiss. Take the rogue-lite ship battling of FTL and the frantic relationship-destroying chaos of Overcooked, and you have a rough idea of This Means Warp.

Instead of lighting the kitchen on fire, you work to flame-broil enemy ships before they make Swiss Cheese out of yours. You have to run around your ship loading weapons with ammo, taking aim, patching holes, and inevitably space yourself when you forget to put on your suit before opening the airlock.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Whereas most party games consist of a series of chaotic puzzles. This Means Warp is a replayable rogue-lite where your failures carry the real consequences of your friends judging you for messing up the entire run for the 8th time in a row. Fear not, for failure comes with new unlocks, and fresh arguments about who is on repair duty.

Gideon’s Bias	This Means Warp Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Jagex LTD
Hours Played: 18+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: Xbox Series X	Platforms: PC, Xbox Platforms, PlayStation 4/5, and Nintendo Switch.
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Party Game, Rogue-lite
Mode Played: Normal, & Hard	Price: $19.99

FTL (FIX THE LEAK)

Do you remember the old cartoons where a pipe springs a leak, and a character puts a finger over it? It always causes a cascade of additional leaks until the character runs out of fingers and toes to plug them. That was me in This Means Warp. But rather than just getting wet, the end result was usually my ship exploding into space dust.

I mostly played with my partner who was an unrepentant gun hog, So you could often find me running around the ship screaming as Bob, toolbox in hand and sweat glistening from my bald head. I rushed to patch holes, fix guns, and patch more holes.

My partner, bless her bloodthirsty heart, would often collide with me in her rush to sate her need for violence, knocking the toolbox out of my grip. I’d seldom notice until I arrived at the hole in the ship that was rapidly depleting our oxygen with nothing in hand but my own crushed aspirations of surviving that run.

Keeping the holes patched is important for more than just keeping your choking fetish a secret. Each bit of damage is on a timer, once that timer ticks down you can still fix the wall or equipment, but the damage to your ship’s health bar is permanent.

The cool thing is, the enemy ships aren’t just a bag of hit points. They function the same way you do. They have to frantically run around arming weapons and patching holes just like you. A large part of keeping your ship in one piece is to strategically take apart theirs.

Blast a wall when one of them walks by and watch them get sucked into the cold embrace of space. If they are busy respawning, they aren’t shooting you. Take out their ammo bins and they have to repair them to get ammo. If a teammate throws a bomb into a room, you can destroy the door to ensure it has ample time to explode.

The back-and-forth game of tic-tack take that, is one of the things that makes This Means Warp so fun. You aren’t just managing a chaotic puzzle because the chaos is created in real-time by an enemy ship. That makes it unpredictable and engaging. You can have moments where your crew hits a stride of efficiency and you cruise through battles, only for one unexpected attack or miscalculation to have a domino effect into catastrophe.

This Means Warp has that frantic party game fun factor alongside gameplay that’s a bit deeper than the genre usually allows. However, it’s still super easy to pick up and understand.

Star Tech

This Means Warp is a pretty challenging game, even on normal difficulty, and the game gives you plenty to dig through if you are up for the challenge. There are two ships, one uses ammo for its weapons, while the other is battery-powered and needs its systems recharged. Each ship has several unlockable scenarios as well, and the game tracks which difficulties you completed on which scenarios.

There are also several unlockable characters, each of which has different starting stats between movement speed, repair skill, and attack power. If you are playing with less than four people you will also acquire AI crewmates, and you can toggle what jobs they perform.

The AI can be pretty dense when it comes to prioritizing which holes to patch first, but they actually do a decent job otherwise, and that makes the This Means Warp a bit more single-player friendly than most party games.

The real meat is the various weapons, gadgets, and power-ups you can unlock and later buy during runs. These range from fire beams, and rocket launchers, to shield systems you can control to protect parts of the ship. You can even get a teleporter to board the enemy ships and turn their own weapons against them.

The various weapons and gadgets are a lot of fun and you acquire them in such a way that you’re never sure what you’re going to get, but still have a degree of agency in how to outfit the ship. Going with a bomb-heavy strategy feels different than stacking shield modules and frantically sprinting around to use them, for example.

That said, a lot of the improvements you pick up are somewhat one note. You earn orbs to enhance your weapons and gear, but the optimal choice is usually obvious. You just put the biggest damage buffs on weapons, and cooldown on everything else. Health seemed entirely useless by comparison and we often opted to just sell those rewards.

Replayability is an important part of a rogue-lite game and This Means Warp has plenty of it, although it could use a bit more. The mini-game missions you encounter outside of combat get repetitive fast, and the game really could do with another type of ship or two. However, the variety of scenarios does put an enjoyable spin on things.

The Empire Crashes Back

I really enjoy This Means Warp. Pulling inspiration from FTL for a co-op party game is a brilliant idea that’s executed really well. However, one thing stains the entire game, and to a terrible extent. The crashing.

I reviewed This Means Warp on an Xbox Series X, and I encountered a crashing issue that happens randomly, but often enough to be a real problem. The issue isn’t so much the crashing itself, but what comes after.

I’ll be honest, as long as I can load back into a game, I’m not all that bothered by a game crashing. You can load right back into This Means Warp, but it’s broken. For some reason, when you resume playing after a crash it resets the enemies’ stats. You could be two hours into a run, and the ships you fight have the HP, defense, and damage of the enemies you fought at the beginning of the game. You will completely overpower everything you face including the final boss.

This issue eventually siphoned my will to play. I have not completed a single run where a crash didn’t happen, breaking the game’s entire balance afterward. There are scenarios I haven’t unlocked because starting entirely over after a crash is a big waste of time, yet playing onward is incredibly dull with the reset enemies. It’s a huge bummer.

I have chatted with the developers, and even provided them with a bit of video to help solve the issue. Hopefully, it gets patched, because it’s borderline unplayable while the bug persists, and that’s a shame because the game itself is genuinely fun.

Verdict

This Means Warp is incredibly fun and shines the brightest with friends. It could do with a bit more variety in some places, but the biggest thing holding it back is the crashing issue, and I sincerely hope it’s resolved soon.

A co-op party game FTL is definitely an inspired concept and the type of thing I’d like to see more of. From a gameplay perspective, This Means Warp might shoot for the stars and ever so slightly miss, but it definitely landed on the moon instead.

Frantically running a spaceship together is simply a fun thing to do. The rogue-lite nature makes failures sting a bit more than in other party games, but I think the added depth is a worthy trade-off.