
It'll take around 13 or so hours to finish a single run, and even after doing that, you can carry on unlocking stuff and taking on harder enemies, or upping the difficulty. I don't always love Void Bastards as a shooter, even if I really like everything around the shooting-the cadence of unlocking new tools and other rewards has a perfect power curve. You have to circumnavigate some giant void whales, too, which can eat your ship and end your run instantly. You can also set off an EMP blast that can knock out nearby threats. If you loot a torpedo aboard a ship, you can later use it to blow up a pirate vessel and escape, where you'd otherwise normally be tethered to their ship. While the FTL-style space interface is pretty simple stuff-you don't make narrative choices like you do in that game-some of the outcomes are cool. Lee worked on the Freedom Force games, so it's no surprise the game looks so damn nice. The comic book-style visuals, from art director Benjamin Lee and 3D artist Dean Walshe, are fantastic, and even extend to the crafting menu and look of your criminal character.

You can get attacked by pirates, who hunt you down on a ship, and need to be untethered from yours, which is an interesting in-game event. There are a lot of other things to like in Void Bastards.

Using a teleportation gun to manually move an enemy in front of a couple of allied turrets felt cool, for example, but usually there's too much going on to pull off anything that precise, and I'm better off throwing some cluster bombs then legging it. I don't always love Void Bastards as a shooter, even if I really like everything around the shootingĮven with all the tools, only occasionally did I feel like I was using a strategy more nuanced than 'kill everything as fast as possible with explosives', or 'run away'. Overriding turrets is a useful way to get them to stop firing at you-especially the deadlier versions waiting deeper into the game-but having them as allies rarely feels that useful in the mostly tight corridors of these ships. Some of the pieces of the combat don't quite click together for me. Mostly, though, I found firefights to be a bit of a slog, with some levels jam-packed with enemies that aren't loads of fun to fight in excessive numbers. Sometimes Void Bastards captures the thrilling feeling of being a thief who grabs the objective, gets caught, then escapes in a hail of gunfire. It reminds me of Borderlands, in that I'm fighting the tone of the game to enjoy the rest of it. Generally, the tone isn't too offensive, and some of the out-of-level jokes aren't bad either. Humour is extremely subjective, so this might appeal to you, but after the hundredth time of hearing a variant of 'twatface!' I realised they were actually spoiling the experience of playing the game.

One of the basic enemies shouts 'surprise, buttface/twatface!' whenever you're caught by them, which I can't stand, and the game is rife with enemies barking irritating British things (note: I am British). It's the NPC barks that really turn me off the enemies in Void Bastards, though.
Void bastards outpatient weak spot download#
This means you can roughly learn where you're going on each ship (usually to the helm, where you can download a map of where all the loot is on a given ship), but that you can't really be certain of what you'll go up against. The levels are partly procedurally generated (opens in new tab): the maps of the different ships you'll board stay the same, but walls, enemy locations, obstacles and more will change each time. A positive one might be better aim, or a higher chance of a critical shot. A negative perk might be your character coughing every now and then, attracting enemy attention, or being more easily detected by security cameras and gun turrets. Your character has pre-existing perks, both positive and negative, and if you die, you play as another disposable criminal with different perks. Mostly, though, your time is spent navigating these ships in first-person, looking for specific items to progress, then escaping before you're killed. You get across space with an FTL-style map interface, and while most locations are enemy spaceships that you can board, loot and subsequently escape, there are also stores, asteroid ranges and deadly hazards to be aware of. You are a prisoner, travelling across the galaxy to please the whims of a HR computer that might eventually grant you your freedom.
