Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Free All Month)
Microsoft’s February 2017 offering of Games with Gold free games are now available for players to download from the store. And while a free game is always worth checking out if nothing in your library is appealing to you, you may be wondering just what these titles are, and if they’re worth your time.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is platformer/shooter that’ll put you and a friend’s teamwork skills to the test. You’ll be thrown into a small spaceship together and will have to defeat the dangers of space that stand in your way. Oh, and there’s also a bit of a catch.
While in some sci-fi games, you can control your ship, engage shields, thrusters, and turrets all with a few button presses, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime only allows you to control one of these things at a time each. And you literally have to move your character to the control station for that specific thing. That means you’ll both be frantically sprinting around the maze-like interior of your spaceship pretty much constantly in order to survive.
This makes for one of the most immersive and enjoyable co-op experiences you can grab for the Xbox One right now. It’s charming, frantic, and has that easy to pick up but difficult to master feel.
That being said, if you’d be playing Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime on your own, you probably won’t enjoy this as much as you would in a co-op experience. That’s not to say the AI partner does a bad job, but it feels far more satisfying and intense when you avoid certain death by the skin of your teeth with the help of a friend. A true bonding exercise of a game… until it all goes wrong, anyway.
Metacritic score: 82