Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a space shooter that can be played with between one to four players. It was developed by Asteroid Base and released on September 9th, 2015 for Xbox One and PC through Steam, with PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch ports following on February 9th, 2016 and October 3rd, 2017, respectively.
The job of all four players is to navigate a spaceship with four stations inside. These station control the spaceship's weapons, engine, shield, Yamato cannon, and map. The players must move between controlling all four stations to balance flying the ship, attacking enemies, and protecting it from danger. In the regular campaign, the players must move through levels to find and rescue a variety of creatures, in addition to collecting upgrades that can be used to improve the ship's various systems. The game's four worlds have four levels each and end with a boss fight.
This game provides examples of:
- 2-D Space: Despite being set in outer space, navigation is strictly along a vertical two-dimensional plane, with the player looking from the side.
- Asteroid Thicket: Most levels take place in clusters of floating space rocks, interspersed with Baby Planets and miniature stars. Dense swarms of moving asteroids also appear as navigational hazards.
- Attack Its Weak Point: Ursa Major can only be damaged by attacking its face, and will protect itself with its invulnerable claws when not attacking directly.
- Attack Reflector: Upgrading the shield with beams gems allows it to bounce missiles, energy projectiles, and fireballs back the way they came and towards their senders.
- Baby Planet: The levels' planets are quite tiny, often being smaller than the players' spaceship and almost always much smaller than the random masses of rock also floating around, but nonetheless manage to have respectable gravitational pull. In a more extreme example, stars are also the same general size.
- Bears Are Bad News: The first boss, Ursa Major the Great Bear, is a gigantic space bear powered by "anti-love" that tries to destroy your spaceship.
- Breath Weapon: The enemies resembling small red-and-yellow flies breathe streams of flame at short range.
- Broken Armor Boss Battle: Orion covers itself in icy armor that your weapons cannot penetrate. This must be thawed out by shooting the suns he periodically lights up to throw at you, which will cause them to eject clusters of plasma that will melt his armor if they hit him; this will leave him vulnerable until he refreezes himself.
- Celestial Body: The constellations fought as bosses at the end of each level have a faint pattern of stars over their robotic bodies.
- Collision Damage: Touching enemies and terrain causes damage to the ship. One of the ship upgrade options, the Jelly Roll, has a protective coating that allows it to ignore contact damage from terrain.
- Co-Op Multiplayer: While you can play with an AI buddy (a space-cat), this game was designed with co-op in mind. Each player can only man one system at a time — you can shoot one gun, move the shield, or move the ship, but no more without abandoning your current station, and actually moving or doing things requires players to coordinate their efforts.
- Deflector Shields: You can deploy such a shield, but it'll only cover a quarter of the hull at best, and so it has to be strategically rotated in order to meet the incoming attacks.
- Destructible Projectiles: The missiles fired by the enemies are easily destroyed by your energy weapons.
- Disneyfication: Anti-Love, because hate is the H-Word. Also an example of Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp".
- Eldritch Abomination: The Anti-Love forces are hateful beings from outside of the universe who wish to destroy it with The Power of Hate.
- Energy Weapon: The main guns fire sprays of small pink lasers, while the Yamato cannon fires a sustained burst of powerful energy projectiles. Upgrading them with beam gems causes the main guns to fire more powerful lasers in short bursts and the cannon to produce either a single steady laser beam (when upgraded with a single gem), a trio of moving lasers (two gems), or a wide spray of energy blasts (a beam gem and a power gem).
- Flash of Pain: The edges of the screen flash red if your ship gets damaged.
- Hailfire Peaks: The Orion levels consist of primarily frozen environments, filled with icy walls and enemies covered in impenetrable ice armor, contrasted with fiery suns and the occasional swarm of fire-breathing enemies. This is used to the players' advantage, as streams of plasma created when the suns are fired upon and the explosions of defeated fiery enemies are the only things that can thaw out the area's icy barriers and armors.
- Hearts Are Health: Health pickups are represented as bright pink hearts held inside clusters of bubbles.
- Heavily Armored Mook:
- One type of enemy is covered in metal armor that deflects all of the ship's attacks. Damaging it requires baiting it into ramming into your shield, which will leave temporarily flipped around with its armor opened.
- Enemies in the Orion levels are covered in shells of ice that the ship's weapons cannot break. Dealing with them requires firing into the suns scattered around the area to create small flares that will melt the armor.
- Homing Projectile: Adding a power gem to the Yamato cannon causes it to fire off swarms of small missiles that home in on and chase down enemies and bosses.
- An Ice Person: Orion coats itself in icy armor and fires sharp chunks of ice at the players' spaceship.
- Kill Enemies to Open: Sometimes, friends are are trapped on a planet and can only be rescued by destroying all the enemies on that planet.
- Level Goal: Rescue at least five friends in order to open the way to the next level.
- Living Constellation: The bosses at the end of each world are constellations — Ursa Major the Great Bear, Cetus the Sea Monster, Orion the Hunter, and Cepheus the Star King — that come to life as blue-purple robotic versions of themselves dotted with stars. Defeating them makes them return to being inert constellations.
- Outrun the Fireball: Sometimes after rescuing friends, a bomb appears and explodes which you have to escape from to avoid massive damage. Thankfully, the explosion is pretty slow.
- Post-Defeat Explosion Chain: After being defeated, each boss briefly convulses as explosions rock their body before being turned back into an inert constellation.
- Power Crystal: Upgrades for ship stations are represented by gems that can be attached to them to give them different powers. Generally speaking, power gems increase how many shots a weapon fires at once and increase the engine's propulsion, beam gems replace projectiles with laser beams, and metal gems replace guns with wrecking balls or sawblades and cause the engine to leave behind clusters of mines when used.
- The Power of Love: What the universe is literally run with and what you have to use to combat the anti-love.
- Power-Up: Game progression works mainly by collecting Power Crystals that improve the ship's guns, shields, and engine. Additionally, rescuing friends allows the players to purchase additional upgrades, starting with the ability to add additional gems to the ship stations, which allows for their different effects to be mixed together, and progressing to ships with special abilities or with pre-powered stations.
- Randomly Generated Levels: Each level is different every time you play it, even after dying.
- Sea Monster: Cetus, the Sea Monster, is a living constellation in the form of a huge serpent that swims around in a watery planetoid, periodically emerging to attack the players, spawning clusters of fishlike enemies, or churning its home to create tidal waves.
- Segmented Serpent: Cetus appears as a robotic serpent made of several distinct body segments, which must be shot off one by one to expose its head to damage.
- Sequential Boss:
- Orion begins its battle by walking along the edges of his chamber and attacking the ship with strikes of his clubs, leaving a fairly safe spot in the middle. At half health, his torso detaches from his legs and starts chasing the ship down, while the legs walk around independently and strike at the ship when it comes close.
- When King Cepheus is killed, his body disintegrates but leave his eyes behind, which start flying around as distinct entities and chasing the ship while firing off streams of energy projectiles.
- Shows Damage: Both the ships and enemies will develop increasingly visible cracks as they take more and more damage.
- Space Zone: The game's levels are free-floating 2DSpace areas set within clusters of rocky bodies, where players navigate around Baby Planets and stars that will catch their ship in their orbits, dense swarms of damaging asteroids, and endless hordes of robotic enemies, before fighting constellation monsters at the end of each world.
- Spread Shot: Some of the Yamato upgrades work like this, offsetting the players' inability to control its constant rotation around the ship by firing off bursts of projectiles over wide areas.
- The basic, non-upgraded cannon fires a sequence of energy projectiles over a short arc.
- One power gem changes it to a missile battery that fires a spread-out swarm of small homing projectiles, which then chase down any enemy within a certain area of them. An additional power gem increases the number of missiles.
- A beam gem and a power gem create a wide spray of laser blasts over a few seconds.
- A metal gem and a power gem create a sawblade cannon that fires off pairs of saw-toothed metal disks every second or so as it cycles around the ship.
- Under the Sea: A few levels in the Cetus world are set within large, completely flooded cave systems instead of the usual outer space seting. This doesn't really affect gameplay very much, although the enemies in these areas tend to resemble fishes and octopi and areas with strong currents are also present.
- Unlockable Content: The more friends you rescue, the more points you gain which you can use to get new ships. You also unlock new friends upon completing a world.
- Weaponized Exhaust: Beam and Metal gems add various offensive capabilities to the thrust such as depositing caltrops or having the thrust itself burn enemies.
