Fueled Up is going to have a hard time trying to hide its inspiration, as any keen eye will immediately see. This spaceship handymen game is clearly based on the successful Overcooked series but trades all the delicious dishes for more mundane tasks that will determine the fate of your travel. With local and online co-op for up to four players, there’s some fun mayhem to be had with friends, but the truth is that some of the assignments can be dull and make you want to be devoured by an evil octopus from space, of all things.

Overcooked in Space

Your main task in Fueled Up is to keep your spaceship safe and moving forward. Constant delivery of fuel to the engines is crucial to keep it away from the clutches of a giant space octopus, but that is easier said than done. The various tasks suddenly start piling up beyond reason, with you and your fellow astronauts bumping onto each other and adding up to the chaos and mayhem. This will result in some fun moments but also a fair bit of frustration and hair-pulling.

Most of your time will be spent refueling the engines and fixing meteor holes on the ship. The latter is the more recurrent task that you will have to face, a distraction from the other more important chores that ends up sucking some of the fun out of the matches due to its repetitive nature. However, you must keep at it, because if the hull reaches zero percent, the ship will blow up to pieces even before the space octopus lays its grubby tentacles on you.

The spaceship levels are neatly crammed into a single screen, boosting the potential for hectic matches. The tasks aren’t hard to accomplish, but the layout is designed in a way that makes you fall prey to countless hazards. Smoke to clutter your vision, rotating platforms, floor tiles that disappear as you step on them, airlock doors that open randomly… there are plenty of distractions that are going to hinder your progression, and cooperation is crucial to speed up the execution of tasks. You will fall to your doom a lot, but apart from the few seconds lost and your pride taking a hit, you can respawn without any additional consequences.

The issue with Fueled Up is that not everything is there to naturally challenge you and place you in interesting and enjoyable situations. Some of the obstacles are more annoying than fun, true pitfalls that will frustrate your progress instead of getting you to giggle with your friends as each one struggles to complete a task. Other times, it’s not easy to see what is going on, due to the deluge of effects that sometimes clutters the screen. There’s a fine balance between entertainment and exasperation that games such as Overcooked nail down, but Fueled Up doesn’t quite hit the mark.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Matchmake

You can play Fueled Up solo, switching between two characters in a curious but also awkward way. This is not how the game was designed to be played, so it won’t be very fun or intuitive to alternate control between two characters. With more players, there’s some potential for enjoyable shenanigans as soon as you understand how everything works and what you must do to perform the tasks.

The problem is that you truly need to have a few friends around to play Fueled Up. Couch co-op is seemingly going to be your only option, because the official launch didn’t bring a significant number of players into the spaceship, therefore the player base is extremely low. Finding an online match is pretty much impossible, so your options are very limited in what is essentially a multiplayer-only game with a tacked-on solo mode.

Fueled Up is a competent co-op game that doesn’t seem to take many risks and move past its obvious inspiration. It’s not as ingenious, humorous, or frantic as Overcooked and gets a bit too confusing for its own good, but if you’re looking for something to play locally, you could do a lot worse than this tale of space handymen.

Pros

• Occasionally interesting and fun co-op action
• Cute art style

Cons

• Doesn’t work as a solo game
• Some tasks are more frustrating than fun
• Visibility issues get in the way

Rating: 6/10