This will be the second time I’m reviewing something that Taylor already has. The last time it was Skyrim for the Switch and Skyrim for the Xbox One with lots of mods ruining the game. This time it is Void Bastards, something I’ll have fun talking about on video with YouTube’s mess about swearing. Though, the last time I spoke about Australians and swearing, I admitted the thousands of deaths in H.M.P Slade; Let’s not do that again. Void Bastards is a rogue-lite first-person-shooter, feeling similar to High Hell and Strafe, with a clear finger pointing back to first-person sci-fi shooters.

A beautifully messy comic book style is one of the most appealing things you’ll first notice, as it’s not often adopted by many games. It has a truly defining, dark sci-fi aesthetic that is polarizing to the eye. In some way the clear thick lines, dark colors, and desolate spaceship pull out how dark the game is. This is balanced, of course, with comedically unfamiliar cockney accents swearing at you while bright bullets fly towards you. It is a little disorienting to the senses at times. However, after a while, it does become a little dry once you’ve seen the same dark corridor outside the airlocks several times over.

You play as Dave, Bernard, Clive, Patty, Betty, and Sybil. As a rogue-lite, you play as a rotating cast of prisoners in a space-age prison. You’ll be on the hunt for an ID card to kick start the FTL-drive, which brings me to another comparison with a rogue-like. The map leading to your next dungeon, or spaceship, as it were, is done in that FTL-style star map. All with a story told to you by the wonderful voice of Kevan Brighting, the comedic voice of The Stanley Parable.

All of this chaotic discombobulation of dark sci-fi from System Shock and Bioshock, combined with the fast-paced shooting of classic Doom, and comedic tones from the distant voices of aliens calling you names builds atmosphere. The problem is that the ships never have this strong feeling. Instead, they feel rather empty at times. In some form, given the outside is often the ruins of a massive space war or something just as destructive, it makes sense to be desolate ships of destruction that we’re salvaging in an effort for escape. Though it does kill the mood once it all goes quiet and you can take a minute.

Death is a thing of common occurrence, that’s the point of a rogue-lite or rogue-like. Nevertheless, I thought that as a way to make the game a little more interesting I’d play it like Doctor Who, it is in space, I have a run button, and there are plenty of corridors to run in. It turns out that being a Timelord, the last of your race, and constantly being chased by space nazis, apparently gives you some natural luck of not dying too often in over 1000 years. Void Bastards isn’t a game you’ll want to play as a stealth, no guns, just run kind of game; Believe me, I’ve tried and it doesn’t work.

Putting aside my testing of something that was never going to work, there is one enemy that can get right in the bin alongside Davros and his upside-down bin army. The Screws are just the worst thing to start out with on any ship early on, since they are more or less unkillable for a while. Even then, you have to unload half of your ammo just to kill one, and that’s tricky enough when you don’t pay attention to what you are picking up. I’d have liked to have them being sucked out of windows into space, but I guess the glass is meant to keep the pressure of the ship and in-theory lets it withstand space debris.

Everything else really works, including turrets, weapon upgrades, and constantly being sworn at by child-like aliens that you want to punt up and down the corridors. It keeps that atmosphere as long as it is constant. It is when you become powerful enough to clear out the Janitors, Juve, and other early enemies that things become less enjoyable. There is a bit of a lull, as you try to strike the balance between progression and difficulty. The last thing I’ll highlight before I head to the general opinion is the F.O.V slider in the options. The bottom of my stomach would be thanking the developers if it wasn’t consuming cake and coffee.

Overall, Void Bastards is a beautiful, chaotic, wonder of furiously collecting everything the map has to offer. It is a little bewildering at first, between running at breakneck speeds, and the bullets flying at your face with suicide-bombing monsters. However, that’s the fun bit. Though the constant list of things to craft to get the next upgrade and pieces of the story feels like another 100 percent list I’ll never bother with. Void Bastards is fun in all the right ways of endless death.

A PS4 review copy of Void Bastards was provided by Blue Manchu for this review.

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Void Bastards

$29.99 USD

8

Score

8.0/10

Pros

• Wonderful comic book art style.
• Face-paced gunplay
• Devilishly dark sci-fi humor.
• The odd cockney shouting aliens.

Cons

• You can't blow out the window to kill the Screws.
• A lack of atmosphere on a silent ship.