Stars of Icarus takes one of my favourite team multiplayer experiences into space, and a big new playtest has just begun

Not to get mushy, but there's a special pleasure to working together with other people to achieve your goals. While many of the best multiplayer games keep the requirements for actual teamwork to a minimum, I tend to find myself favoring those that reward it. It's why I've long had a soft spot for Dota 2 (and now Deadlock), and why, long before the launch of Sea of Thieves, you could find me playing Guns of Icarus. So I'm overjoyed that developer Muse Games is back and taking us into space with Stars of Icarus, which has just kicked off a two-week playtest on Steam.

If you've never played Guns of Icarus, it's a steampunky airship-battling PvP game where you must work as a crew to operate your craft, man the guns, and repair any damage as it happens. It's a similar level of team coordination to Sea of Thieves, but with a more direct focus on competitive battles against other squads. Stars of Icarus evolves that concept by transforming it into a space game, which naturally creates fresh problems to solve and offers more advanced tech to deal with them.

The six available ships are divided into one-player fighters, two-player corvettes, and three-player frigates, so you'll need to decide how to best organize your team of five across the fleet. As a crew member, you're able to adjust the boosters you bring as a pilot, gunner, and engineer. One person will want to take the helm and be in charge of steering. The more enclosed nature of spaceships than the airships of old means vision is somewhat restricted, so you'll want to use the antenna station for a better view; there's also an active scan that will spot "nearly everything" in your vicinity, but gives away your own position in the process.

As a ship captain, you're able to select from various tech and drive stations. The former allows you to switch your specialities between the likes of hacking opponents' components, using repulsors for improved mobility and to push enemy spacecraft around, or installing an 'emergency jump' that can warp you out of danger in a pinch. The latter adjusts your engines; opt for pure speed, employ stealth to get the drop on foes, or charge a portal to immediately leap straight into combat. Keep in mind that you'll typically need assistance from the rest of your crew to make optimal use of these.

You won't always have the manpower to cover everything you want to get done, so there are tools to automate systems, albeit at lesser efficiency. Choose the gun automation to have your turrets target marked foes, or switch to repair automation to gradually fix issues around the ship, starting with the highest-priority problems such as broken shields or engines. There's also an automaton unit that you can place down to handle jobs while you're working elsewhere, although you'll have to manually move it to the next location once it's done. "You can't automate your automaton," Muse Games explains.

As a pilot, you'll need to make careful use of your engines - turn them off and you can make tighter turns. When in the one-man fighters, you can charge boost by drifting to convert into rapid forward velocity. The real fun comes when you hop on the guns, of course. Different weapon types offer different specialities: plasma damage rips shields apart, and once they're down you can barrage the hull with kinetic weapons. There are various elemental ammo options to switch between, and the larger spacecraft have the ability to install batteries with multiple matching guns for added devastation.

The Stars of Icarus playtest is running from Friday December 5 until Sunday December 21. Ranked competitive matches will be live on Saturdays and Sundays between 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT / 5pm CET and 12pm PT / 3pm ET / 8pm GMT / 9pm CET.

You can apply to join on Steam, and are free to share footage publicly. Gold rewards have been ramped up to let you try out lots of cosmetics temporarily, and there's also the ability to test the dedicated server-hosting tools if you wish.

Muse Games notes that this alpha test "should give you a good feel for the gameplay experience" of the full thing, and that it already has a range of control options (including one that should feel familiar to Guns of Icarus veterans). It notes that applicants are being added in stages, but reassures that there will be "plenty more" playtests in the future if you don't manage to get in this time.