I’m messing with Void Bastards now. It’s an FPS roguelike with a comic-book aesthetic and it leans hard into an absurdist British bureaucracy running joke where violence and your highly probable gruesome demise are remarked on casually and clinically. Okay, I guess. It’s not particularly funny, but I suppose it’s flavorful.
You’re one of a series of poor schmucks resurrected out of dehydrated storage and booted out into space in a boarding shuttle to go loot randomly-generated derelict space vessels for Macguffins you need. Your resources steadily dwindle and this provides a lot of the tension.
You need fuel/food to jump between ships, which need to be scavenged as you go (and not every ship is going to have them).
Ammunition is similarly scarce and you have no melee attack. You can bring one firearm, and one “indirect” weapon (so far I’ve got a proximity mine thing). Thus far the pistol you start with is lethal enough but pretty inaccurate so you’re not going to be headshotting anyone (and I’m not entirely positive if location-based damage is a thing in this game).
You get 7 minutes worth of oxygen once you board a ship. This can be refilled at a station in each ship, in a room that is always helpfully labeled ATMO.
Merits are your cash, which can be spent to (somewhat amusingly) unlock security doors or activate/deactivate certain spaceship functions such as security turrets. It can also be used to extend your oxygen meter to 15 minutes, which is awfully handy and thus far has been my main use for it.
One kindness the game extends is a little scouting report on nearby ships so you know roughly what you’re getting into in terms of enemy density and what loot you can expect to find, though on the latter count I think it doesn’t always tell the whole story. Weapons and stuff you craft get salvaged between runs, so there’s your roguelite progression mechanic. Also as in some other games, each time you’re in a new body you have a quirk, some advantageous and some not. My first guy had a smoker’s cough that would alert nearby enemies. My second character, a lady named Jackson, is a fast runner.
I’ve gone through one failed run, and I’ll probably dip in for a little more but I’ve yet to run into anything truly compelling to motivate a real strong desire to finish. I think this game might be a little too weak both in terms of novel content/mechanics to get its hooks into me.
The art was much better looking live than in trailers – it really is gorgeous, and that’s where I enjoyed it most.
The pitch, ‘*shock as roguelike’, catnip to me, isn’t fulfilled well as enemies are aggressive enough and timers tight enough that it ends up being a clumsy shooter in practice. And it again demonstrates how we haven’t yet cracked good 3D procedural generation; there aren’t nearly enough room objects and the reskinning (hospital ship, pleasure ship) doesn’t disguise their functional layouts. Ah well.
I’d put it as a close miss, the kind we’re drowning in; gorgeous pleasurable mid-budget indies that can’t rise above ‘good’, ready to be reclaimed in twenty years when being out of time makes it more interesting.
Been playing Steambirds Alliance, the shmup permadeath MMO about to come out of early access. It’s come a long way since I first tried it two years ago. The enemy patterns are creative and dynamic and interact interestingly with the various player abilities.
There is a lot of Diablo influence in it too, and one big improvement they made over Diablo is that the constant respeccing means you don’t get stuck in a rut of using the same ability combo over and over unless you want to (and can survive). And the recycling economy with high-level players’ trash bootstrapping the newbies works really well (and I’ve started to do it more deliberately with my own fleet now that I have a high level primary who hasn’t died)
