Void Bastards

Void Bastards is a hyper-polished work of art. If the only complaint I have is that there should be more of it, they’re clearly doing something right. I’m very excited to see where this developer goes next.

This is a game that takes the side activities in BioShock and puts its full weight behind it. If you’ve ever hoarded every useless scrap of paper and loose cigarette in other games, Void Bastards will reward you. It’s a constant cycle of upgrading your character and venturing deeper into the void while you find new rooms and tougher challenges. Best of all, there’s a definitive end alongside the promise of a harder difficulty. It’s everything you could want in a procedural shooter, bridging the gap between action and strategy in an innovative new way that makes it easy to want to jump into the void over and over again.

Void Bastards is a pure, crystalline distillation of the immersive sim genre - all the feeling with none of the fluff. Full of variables, it invites the player to experiment and be experimented upon.

Void Bastards is a terrific game that balances the joy of exploration with the fear of failure in a wonderful way. It could use some more incentives to keep playing, but it's a blast while it lasts.

Void Bastards does a lot for such a small game — layered elements building a player experience where approach must always be varied and considered. The formula is simple — the ship computer asks you to procure items, you go find the items. In this sense, I thought I would find the game boring after awhile, but it’s actually surprisingly addictive, each wreck a new excitement-filled run, as you try to grab what you can, improvise on your feet, and most importantly, stay alive! Its simplicity is part of the appeal, but it also packages plenty of dark humour and absurd fun to go along with the ride. If you enjoy indie rogue-likes, or space scavenger hunts, the Void Ark awaits.

Void Bastards is a fun and fresh mix between classic first-person shooter and modern roguelikes. Focusing on giving the player more problems than punishments, Blue Manchu has crafted a game that is fun from the beginning to the end. Furthermore, its aesthetics and graphics are simply gorgeous. One of the greatest surprises of 2019 so far.

The mix of comic-book aesthetics, exhilarating soundtrack, and solid shooter gameplay make Void Bastards an absolute delight. Sprinkle that with a bucketload of dark humor and bizarrely mutated enemies and you get an incredibly addictive game, which forces you to go through the same gameplay loop over and over again.

Void Bastards is a fun roguelike that mixes up strategy and FPS mechanics, all surrounded by a unique art design and excellent story.

Void Bastards offers a unique mix of strategy, roguelike, and shooting. Though the environments are not very different from each other and the confrontations with enemies aren't great, the variation in levels and characteristics of your player make Void Bastards great fun.

The joy of Void Bastards, once it reveals itself, is that no action, no decision, is standalone. [Issue#334, p.112]

Void Bastards is an absolutely beautiful first-person shooter game but the lack of varieties for enemies and maps makes it feel repetitive.

Void Bastards might be the perfect introductory roguelite for beginners. Retaining all of your hard-earned weapons and upgrades across deaths – coupled with not starting on the same boring level with every new character – makes this a more user-friendly take on the genre than we’re used to. The nail-biting tension that it starts with doesn’t last for the entire journey, but it’s worth experiencing for the gorgeous aesthetic alone.

Although it would benefit from being either a bit shorter and/or having a bit more variety, Void Bastards is easy to recommend. It looks unique and has enough fun baked in that failure rarely feels frustrating or punishing. Fans of action games as diverse as Bioshock or FTL will enjoy it and anyone who chuckles at games like The Stanley Parable will feel at home with Void Bastards’ sense of absurd humor.

Void Bastards is based on a neat concept inspired by many things, especially System Shock 2. Too bad it's a bit too monotonous.

Void Bastards is not very special, and is not the first title that mixes FPS with Roguelike, but nevertheless the final package is fun and different from most titles, and you'll probably spend hours after hours enjoying it.

This game is an idiosyncratic joy – a brash, clever, juvenile head-trip, messy at the edges but all the more likable for it. It is loaded with brilliant pop-culture references, channeling not just Adams, 2000AD and Tank Girl, but also anime and 90s industrial dance music. Void Bastards is Cowboy Bebop meets Trainspotting, on a night out, in a galaxy of death.

It fits together disparate genres so perfectly that you wonder how nobody thought to combine them sooner.

Void Bastards succeeds because it keeps you moving forward and rewards you on the way, without feeling like a pushover as a result.

Despite its faults, Void Bastards is still deeply enjoyable. The humor and the art style alone are enough to make this a must-have, but the combat and vast array of weapons and upgrades makes Void Bastards an experience you should not skip.

Void Bastards is funny, misanthropic, and yet still fun to play, and even after arising from some pretty clear inspirations, manages to feel like its own mutated beast.

On the surface, Void Bastards may just seem like another FPS, but there’s an element of strategy layered in which sets it aside from the rest. It takes a bit of the old, mixes it with the new, splashes it with a comic style aesthetic to make a truly wonderful experience that will challenge you to make good decisions, enable you to play how you want and you get to be called a Void bastard, which is brilliant. It feels like a breath of fresh air in a sea of FPS games that all do the same thing.

Void Bastards is more than just a beautiful game, it also has a smart mix of rogue-lite and shooter. It’s a funny little game offering many tactical choices but it doesn’t go much further, and soon becomes repetitive.

A game like a comic book, driven by its snarky story. Gameplay suffers from weak gunplay and repetition, though.

A slightly messy first-person shooter lifted by some excellent weapons and a gorgeous art style.

If more attention was paid to story and less to grind, Void Bastards could potentially rival System Shock. As it is, however, it’s basically just another roguelike. [Issue#241, p.50]