Incredibly easy to fall into "just one more level" with this game. The various systems all work nicely to vary your goals and gameplay styles based on the enemies, modifiers, and layouts. You almost always feel on your back feet, barring some generous ship traits (friendly enemies and free authorizations are significantly easier treks), which led me more than a few times to run the knife's edge between completely reckless and barely escaping. Ended a bit before I was ready to, I wish there had been more of a climax to the journey other than just cruising along the bottom of the nebula.

i'm out of bullets so i can't silence the camera quickly enough before it alerts security. the doors lock me in with a Screw, who i'm trying to kite around the room as a turret spits rockets at me. i'm nearly out of oxygen so i open up the map in between dodging rockets to find a clean route to the atmo room. i bumble into more turrets and use my last 2 zapper shots to disable them, but now the Secbot has caught up with me so i have to keep sprinting as i refill my air.

when this game gets going, there's so many panicked improvisations and fast decisions to be made. it's run-n-gun while lost in a maze. it pushes you hard enough that you aren't always sure you can pull it off, but somehow you make it through with a sliver of health and a few seconds to spare, and it feels fucking incredible.

the comic book art direction is brilliant and permeates the whole game; this is what borderlands wishes it could be. the megacorp satire shtick is perhaps overdone, but it's still done well and i chuckled at the enemy voice responses from time to time. the visual design is clear and well-organized, which is crucial for a game that wants to push you. there's many strategies to take and styles of play, but it's not some deus ex choose-your-hallway bullshit.

What a game! I recently subscribed to Humble Choice and decided to complete the games that are going to be removed on February the 15th. This game is one of them. It wasn't on my radar and I hardly knew anything about it. Having played and completed the main objectives, I can confidently say that it's a hidden gem. I'm surprised not to have heard anything about it up to this point.

It's a rogue lite with an interesting twist. Most of the progress is kept after you die. The difference is you get to play with a new character with unique traits that might be good or bad. The different characters are justified in the story. You also get to lose some of the resources you got along the way. The weapon, armor upgrades, ammo and other resources are kept. The main point is to pillage ships to get resources in order to survive. It's a FPS mixed with resource management and making strategic decisions. The ships are manned by enemies who will rightfully kill you for daring to steal. The amount of enemies, security and hazards are all factors that you need to take into account. It might not be worth it if the enemies are too strong. You get some general intel before entering a ship in order to make your decision. But you also can't skip too many ships because you need fuels and food in order to survive. I love the risk and reward aspect in this game. The characters and setting are also very well realized. It has a unique and dark charm mixed with British humor. I love it!

In terms of flaws. I would have liked a type of training mode to test out the weapons and gadgets you unlock. It feels a bit too risky to try out new toys when it's a matter of life and death.

Honestly, there are so many things that I haven't mentioned. The mechanics can go pretty deep if you want to. There are also pirates and other enemies when you're moving your ship. Just know that it's a game worth playing if you keep an open mind. Its style is not necessarily mainstream but definitely give it a try if you're even mildly interested.

The art direction of this game is actually beautiful.

A hilarious and inventive roguelike shooter that boldly ventures into the depths of space. With its unique comic book art style, strategic decision-making, and clever humor, Void Bastards delivers a fresh and enjoyable experience for fans of the genre.

While some players may find the repetitive nature of the missions and the trial-and-error gameplay to be a drawback, the game's overall charm, humor, and strategic elements make up for these minor flaws. Void Bastards is a refreshing take on the roguelike genre that brings laughter and enjoyment to your intergalactic escapades.

Void Bastards advertises itself as a System Shock 2 roguelike but it's more like a first person Rogue Legacy collectathon with guns. You're trapped in a nebula and you go on derelict ships to collect food, fuel, and resources to build things that either upgrade your arsenal or advance the game's plot. Along the way you'll fight enemies that have unique personalities and attack patterns, along with dealing with pirates that will make mincemeat of you if you're not prepared. Rinse and repeat until you build the final plot device.

The roguelike portions come from your characters being generated after your current one dies, and they're all basically prisoners that have been sentenced for humorous crimes. These crimes affect their traits which either help or hamper you, and include various assortment of abilities including being able to pick up loot just by approaching them, being able to move silently while sprinting, or something negative like having PTSD and combat music starts playing when you're not actually aggroing an enemy. You are able to change your traits if you find ships that have a gene therapy kiosk.

The game presents you with a variety of weapons and gadgets to take on the ships, but as you upgrade, you're pretty much going to stick with three weapons - at least I did - which were the staple gun (basically an automatic shotgun), the bushwhacker (a proximity explosive, very useful for the enemies that try to attack you from behind), and the upgraded kitty bot that releases explosives upon exploding, effectively clearing out a room full of enemies. Enemies almost always prioritize attacking the kitty bot over you unless you attack them, so it's almost a no brainer to take with you unless you absolutely can't. The only times I've used other weapons were when I was forced to after dying, as the game randomizes the ammo your character starts out with once they've regenerated.

Graphically the game looks good. It's a comic book styled 3D game with 2D billboards for weapons and enemies, basically a prettier Doom. They all work with the game's artstyle so I'm not at all complaining.

Difficulty scales the deeper you go into the nebula, as such the resource yield also increases. However despite this, the game pretty much remains the same all throughout its session and the only thing that really keeps it afloat is its comedy. Once the novelty of its comedic tone wears off, the game becomes extremely repetitive.

Playtime: 12 Hours
Score: 7/10

Been wanting to play this game for a while since it came out, and it was free on Epic, so I finally gave it a playthrough. I was interested in this game since it came to us from some of the devs who worked on the System Shock and Bioshock games, with the latter in particular being one of my favorite game series of all time. Plus I am someone who reads comics and have been passionate about them all my life, so the comic book art style was something that attracted me to this game as well! its basically like System Shock, if it were a roguelike.

Playing the game, it will definitely feel familiar to those who have played System shock, with the enemy types, the feeling of isolation in space, and the ships you move through. They definitely nailed the atmosphere and the feeling you could die at any moment. Each time you die, you play as a new character with their own traits. It is possible to swap traits out at specific machines or find these gene altering anomalies in space, which change your traits when you fly your ship near them. The gameplay loop involves your going from ship to ship, looting items, trying to find the main item you need and then hightailing it back to your ship. You also need to keep track of resources like fuel for your ship and food for your character. Each ship is procedurally generate with its own specific traits, that can work both against and for you. E.g. security bots being on your side, hazards like electrical wires, fire and radiation leaks.

I definitely enjoyed the gameplay loop of this game and the weapons are all fun to use. You do at the very least keep your weapons and upgrades when you die and just lose your ammo and supplies (but you start out with a small amount at the start of each run). I love the comic book art style and the soundtrack is also pretty awesome! The game can also be very funny at times, with some very dry British humor.

Some of the things I didn't like was the RNG aspects of it. You can have some runs where you get lucky and your having a great time playing, and other times where the dice doesn't roll in your favor and you just get frustrated. I don't mind RNG in games like Borderlands because its just specifically tied to the weapons you find, and not the levels themselves. I much prefer handcrafted levels that all feel unique from one another. After a while the ships all start to look the same and the gameplay starts to feel repetitive but the game ended for me right about when that started to set in, so it balanced itself out. I also just wish this game had a proper story campaign to hook me, as the games story is pretty basic and is just there to give the player urgency. Even if they perhaps included audio logs or lore entries for you to find, that explained why the universe is the way is, would have helped, but I understand that wouldn't really work with the games RNG nature.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this game and I can recommend it to fans of System Shock or roguelike games. It does require a lot of RAM to play properly on PC, so if you don't have a gaming pc, I'd say check it out on console.

Iba con ganas de que me gustase, y las primeras 3 h son perfectas. El juego es bonito, me voy encontrando nuevos enemigos, las naves son casi todas diferentes, las armas son interesantes.... Pero poco después los nuevos enemigos se acaban y se dedican a recolorear a los que ya hay. Empiezan a ser esponjas de balas en un juego donde no sobran y las armas no se sienten super cómodas. Empiezan a aparecer enemigos con muchísima vida a puñaos que le quitan cualquier atisbo de diversión. Y mil cosas así.

Personalmente que a las 3 h un roguelike se me empiece a hacer tan repetitivo me sorprende para mal. Una pena, al principio me veía echándole decenas de horas.

I think the ultimate problem with Void Bastards is that while it has tons of options, only a select few of those options are actually worthwhile. There are at least 5 options for every slot you could possibly use a weapon or tool in, but out of all of them, only about 1 or 2 each were worthwhile.

The design of incentivizing you to spend as little time as possible and waste as little resources as possible because you're supposed to just find parts and leave means that guns that just let you avoid combat altogether are objectively the most powerful ones. Sure, you could upgrade your pistol to max and be able to one shot maybe 60% of the enemies, wasting tons of bullets and time and risking your own health; but you could also just explore around a bit and make a gun that allows you to lock them in rooms they can't get out of which doesn't even let them respawn so you could explore in peace.

That, plus how quickly you snowball into being overpowered, splits the game in half right down the middle from being engaging and tactical to being a boring collect-a-thon where you clean house nearly every time. The style and music is pretty good, though.