If you are looking for a game to play casually with a few friends (up to 3 others) this holiday season, look no further than Lethal Company. As an early access game, it has really taken center stage because of how it shows what success can look like in a low budget indie game. No matter what type of gamer you are, this game is truly fun for everyone. There are jump scares, ways to prank your friends, level progression, and silly yet realistic story line Lethal Company follows to make it a great game. Dozens of large streams have picked up this game and hundreds of thousands of players have purchased this game for all of the reasons listed above.
First, let’s start with the story. Up to four total players enter a game and begin work for an intergalactic delivery service. Your job is to collect scrap from abandoned planets to sell back to your company to make them profit while you get pennies on the dollar from what you collect – Yes, this is an exploitative delivery company. However, some perks of the job are that each crew gets a spaceship and spacesuits, but every other piece of equipment that is needed must be bought with the money made from selling scrap back to the company. This is where it gets interesting though – why do the newbies have to explore these abandoned planets? Of course, because they are infested with hostile monster alien things. There are many ways to get around these monsters, or die to them, but whichever way you choose, the scrap you collect must be taken back to your ship and sold to the company so that you can meet your quota before the day is over.
A few other interesting mechanics of this game are level progression and proximity voice coms. For each successful mission, you have the chance to get a promotion with the company, meaning you can take on harder missions, but with each failure (or death) there is a chance to get demoted. This is only one aspect of the level progression though. As you promote through the ranks of the company, the levels you must procure scrap from also get harder and more dangerous.
Lastly, proximity voice chat is what really makes this game fun. You can talk with your other crewmates (friends) in-game, but only if your characters are near each other (or if you purchase radios from the company, which costs a pretty penny) can you communicate with each other. So, if you want to communicate with your friends for any reason, there is a decent amount of strategizing your crew has to do just to be able to communicate. Dying in any way makes it so your communications are cut off all together. Although, this is also where the fun can come in – maybe you know where a monster is, you can tell your friend to go explore that area. Maybe you want to act like you died so your friends start getting paranoid, leave the group and stop talking to see how they react. There are a lot of fun and different ways to play this game, whether you want to just have fun with your friends or actually progress through the game, it is all up to you.
Lethal Company is early access, so it is likely only going to get better with time. It is also only a $10 purchase of steam right now, so pretty cost effective for the amount of fun you can have with your friends with it. Finally, it is less than a 1GB download so it can be played on basically any device without any problems. See you around the company!
