Void Bastards is like if Borderlands actually wanted you to believe you were playing a comic book.
While Gearbox’s series of loot-shooters has often looked like Unreal Engine 3D models with a Dark Horse coat of paint, this new roguelite FPS from the former BioShock devs at Blue Manchu fully commits to the bit. The story moments between each run play out as a series of comic panels. A white border boxes the screen in during gameplay. Enemies even move like comic characters, rotating to face you with the two-dimensional front-to-back flip of DOOM’s pixelated imps.
It’s gorgeous, and for the first few hours at least, each new vessel you board is a candy-colored marvel. The decadent magenta Lux Cruise Ships where loot is stashed away in chaffing dishes in high-ceilinged banquet halls. The intestine-like tunnels of the taxi yellow Krell Freighters, where massive barn-door-sized entrances give way to burning hallways. The periwinkle CNT Tax Boats where fuzzy blue carpets mask your footsteps as you creep into cover.
These colorful ships are arrayed along a branching path on a star map segmented into nebulae; the deeper you go, the more difficult the challenge that awaits. The game plays like an endless series of potentially fatal fetch quests, as you take control of the latest in an endless line of procedurally generated prisoners, risking your life to hunt down vital building supplies represented by ink pens, glasses and disembodied fingers you’ll scavenge on each ship.
Once you’ve collected enough materials (divided into plaz, bio, slag, data and volts), you can build new weapons, tools and upgrades— all of which persist from run to run. A spike gun lets you silently poison enemies from the shadows. The Clusterflack sends grenades flying in all directions, a great option for wiping out a room full of enemies. A tazer lets you stun your opponents; a must for taking down relentless (and not easily avoidable) enemy turrets. The build tree reveals wackier items, as well. Kittybots are Roombas shaped like cat’s heads that explode once their health runs out. The Rifter lets you pick up a powerful enemy and move them behind a locked door or, more interestingly, onto a live electric cable. I’ve put in about 15 hours so far, but I anticipate more weird weapons down the line.
You’ll also scavenge for other parts, like Surgery 4 Dummies and a Distended Testicle wrapped in a plastic baggie, to build quest items. You’ll combine those wackily named ingredients to create mundane MacGuffins—an HR computer, an ID card, a printer—which will inevitably, comedically malfunction, sending you back to the old grind.
And, despite the humorous, beautiful set dressing, Void Bastards’ gameplay does, eventually, become a bit of a grind. To be fair, that’s sort of the point. Blue Manchu satirizes the endless, minutiae-obsessed bureaucracy of corporate life through mechanics, placing biting commentary within the structure of a roguelike; a genre defined by performing the same tasks again and again with only slight variations. Void Bastards is basically Same Shit, Different Day: The Game.
But, sharp commentary doesn’t excuse a dull loop. Every single mission plays out like this: Board a ship. Head to the helm to download map data (allowing you to see the location of each loot container on the map). Head to the biggest yellow star on the map to collect the mission item. Leave.
There are minor variations on this formula. Sometimes you’ll need to head to the generator room first to turn the power on. Sometimes (if you don’t have a torpedo in your inventory) pirates will board a ship at the same time you do, and will almost certainly kill you. Sometimes a void whale will swallow you whole resulting in instant death. Other variations depend on your current needs. On the occasions when I was low on health and ammo, I would try to get in and out as quickly as possible. When I had a well-stocked armory and plenty of health-giving sandwiches, I would take my time, scavenging every inch of the ship. Most of the time, you really need to check every nook and cranny, because the bigger more monstrous monsters that lurk on these vessels often take quite a few bullets to bring down and will chew through plenty of your health in the meantime. But, generally: get in, get data, get the mission item, get out. It’s a simple loop that hardly ever changes.
So much of Void Bastards works (and works well) that the lack of interesting mission objectives is deeply disappointing. Many of the folks at Blue Manchu worked on games like BioShock and System Shock 2 — immersive sims defined by well-realized worlds designed to empower player choice. Void Bastards is self-consciously placing itself within a genre that prides itself on offering interesting objectives and a suite of tools to pull them off in creative ways.
Recent immersive sims, empowered by technological advances since the genre’s ‘90s heyday, have doubled down on pushing players to forge their own unique playstyles. Dishonored: Death of the Outsider tasked players with infiltrating a bank guarded by murderous automatons, then gave them three different ways to break in. Prey let players upgrade their strength stat until they could pick up every item that wasn’t bolted down and murder inky black Typhons with a writing desk. The rebooted Hitman games have loaded their worlds with dozens of optional objectives, challenging their players to think creatively; to adopt the logic of their world.
Void Bastards, unfortunately, stifles creativity at times. No matter how you approach the game, much of your time will be spent rifling through drawers. It succeeds at evoking the best of comic book art, but will need some work before its emergent narratives approach the heights of explosive comic book storytelling.
Void Bastards review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Void Bastards is out now on Xbox One and PC.