Void Bastards & Yooka-Laylee Free On Epic

Monday, leaks of Steam’s last sale dates for this year reached as far as the local corner shops, as David spoke of the upcoming sales. Tuesday, I wrote about an Agatha Christie plot with a voice actor, Alexx spoke about some new Witcher cast members, and Riot Games are being pushed by the DFEH to enable employees to open up about misconduct. Wednesday, the Season of Pride broke records, Ubisoft is being watched by a dog, and EA publically apologized for not thinking when delisting the first two Syndicate and Ultima Underworld games. There wasn’t that much news this week.

On to the two games available on the Epic Games Store this week. It is an indie double-bill, both mimicking the realm of retro with their own flavor. Let’s begin with Void Bastards, a spacey Rogue-like attempting to give a shock to the system of the corpse that is the sci-fi horror genre. At least, since Dead Space beat that dead horse with another dead horse. I don’t hate Void Bastards at all. I quite like it, but the meandering pacing of a story told through a Rogue-like with very little material in the first place, isn’t that interesting. You’ll spend a majority of the time stumbling through a corridor of a very nice cartoon-esque spaceship, looking for materials and everything else.

All before the music kicks in and alarms start going off in your head as you hoot like Daffy Duck, legging it back to your little ship. Being a Rogue-like, every ship is different-ish, and every death counts towards learning something new. The trouble is, while I enjoy the art style that features the thick cartoonish lines of Borderlands, everything does feel rather repetitive. It is an interesting first-person shooter with Rogue-like elements but lacks a tight narrative pulling you through on anything more than simple gameplay.

Onto the retro game that feels a little uncomfortable to have the title. I have skid-(mc)marks in my underpants older than the 3D platforming genre, popularized in the PS1 era. Calling Yooka-Laylee any idea of retro is setting fire to my soul. I know what it is trying to be, and I remember watching as Spyro bobbed his little head with that firefly beside him. Nonetheless, we’re in bed with nostalgia and I might need to go to the clinic in the morning because I need to applaud it. Yes, Yooka-Laylee has done it. It has captured that mascot-platforming 3D magic of making me want to fling the controller across the room and swear at something so colorful that I’m unsure if it is a hate crime in June.

This isn’t to say Banjo-Kazooie with lizards and bats is entirely bad. It just doesn’t bring enough new content to the table to say that this has progressed us far enough beyond 2005. We’re still stuck in 1998, but this time we can render something without having it look like it was drawn with a protractor. You still go about a colorful land that has not been corrupted by middle-class white men sputtering quips and murder as if that is affable. While doing so, you collect a series of objects placed around the world by a villain with bad teeth and a mask not covering his mouth, who owns a cape. I might as well break out the one joke I have for that and say he’s an anti-vaxxer.

Neither game is one I’d recommend based on their story, as Void Bastards‘ could be written on half a post-it note, and Yooka-Laylee broke down its four walls to picnic in the radioactive hills of crowdfunding. If you are one of the psychos who enjoy 100% completing fetch quests, Yooka-Laylee is your toy for this week. If you think System Shock 2 needed to be a Rogue-like, Void Bastards is for you. It all comes down to your preference in gameplay, and I’ve played my fair share of both. I’ll just go back to everything I’m reviewing right now: Hades.

All this week, you can pick up Void Bastards and Yooka-Laylee for free on the Epic Games Store until the 26th of August. From that point on, I am going to be flipping burgers. Not because I’ve kicked two of our editor-in-chief’s favorite things to death though. Next week I’ll be talking about Automachef; One part programming, one part factory management, and another part Diner Dash. I could hook the game up to my veins and I’d still be slapping enough spots for a sixth needle.