Void Bastards
Inspired by BioShock and System Shock 2, Void Bastards is a revolutionary new strategy-shooter that will test your wits as well as exercise your aim. Can you lead the misfit prisoners of the Void Ark through the derelict spaceships and myriad dangers of the Sargasso Nebula? Will you make the right choices about what to do, where to go and when to fight? Master combat, manage ship controls, scavenge supplies, craft improvised tools and much more! Forget everything you know about first-person shooters: Void Bastards asks you to take charge, not just point your gun and fire. Your task is to lead the rag-tag Void Bastards out of the Sargasso Nebula. You make the decisions: where to go, what to do and who to fight. And then you must carry out that strategy in the face of strange and terrible enemies.
Steam User 43
games fun but all the "mutated" people just look like what you'd see walking down the street in birmingham so they were kinda lazy with the enemy design
Steam User 23
It's decent for a single playthrough, but it's not the type of game I could sink a hundred hours into.
To summarize the core gameplay loop: you need to craft an object for story progression which requires certain parts, so you go on your map which lets you fly to neighboring ships through a branching map (similar to FTL, though this map goes forever), every ship will have a part needed for crafting something which you can see from the map so go look for the parts you need for story or for upgrades you want to make. Outside of parts the ships will also have materials which if you gather enough you can make the parts you need. Before boarding a ship you will see what enemy types are there, and what random positive/negative modifiers the ship will have (no lights on, lots of fire, enemies drop extra loot, etc.) and based on that you pick your weapon loadout and board the ship. Then go around looting everything quickly while dealing with enemies, some enemies you will want to kill while others you want to incapacitate/avoid.
The game is fun while you are still learning what every enemy does and what weapons are best, and learning what ships you want to target and which you want to avoid. But after you've learned it all the game becomes a grind for materials, and I don't feel the actual gameplay of dealing with enemies while looting is very exciting once you've essentially solved it. Fighting enemies is mostly in tight corridors so the action isn't high intensity shoot outs, it's mostly "oh this enemy is small and fast, let me use my shotgun" or "this enemy is tanky, let me stun him" and then you move on. I feel the game is missing something compared to say FTL wherein between the different builds and crews you get you can put in a lot of time testing out a variety of ways of beating a run, or compared to Gunfire Reborn where the fun combat can carry the game.
So I'm going to recommend it because I think enjoying 13 hours for a game is a respectable amount, but if you want a roguelike to put countless hours in I don't think this is it.
TLDR: game is fun to learn, but becomes tedious once you've finished learning.
Steam User 16
This game was so much better than I could have hoped. I ended up putting almost 100 hours into it and I still don't feel like I'm done with it at all. It calls to me every time I scroll by it in my games library. The only reason I haven't played even more is I don't want to burn out on it. It's the type of game you revisit every year or so to replay the campaign on hard, and that is my intention. I could barely stop myself from re-installing it again early, so I settled on leaving a review instead.
Basically you're on a prison ship stranded in a graveyard of derelict ships. You have a shuttle capable of visiting these derelict ships in sort of an FTL-style beacon to beacon travelling method. These derelict ships still have their crews aboard who have been corrupted by some kind of space madness and are hostile to you. If after looking at the scan of the ship, you decide the risks of boarding are worth the items you might find on board (fuel, food, special parts, building materiels, ammo, money, even augmentations to your genetic structure to give you different abilities), you go into FPS mode and raid the ship.
The core of the gameplay is finding what you need on the ship, while fighting/avoiding the many dangers awaiting you. It's very System Shock-esque. Then using what you've obtained, you can craft needed parts, new weapons, armours, devices.. all sorts of things to get you ready for further challenges when you decide to go for the really valuable stuff deeper in.
Anyway, that's just a summary of what you actually do in the game. It really doesn't do justice to just how intense it is boarding ships and how interesting it is trying out new weapons and devices and how much tension there is in the game just keeping your character alive.
Highly HIGHLY recommended.
Steam User 9
The unique art design breathes fresh life into the genre, offering a memorable and immersive experience. Despite its familiar mechanics, the game's execution and atmosphere set it apart, making it a standout title in its own right.
Steam User 6
Short review: an enjoyable enough rogue lite FPS that manages to entertain for a time, with its colourful but bleak design and its scavenging system... unfortunately, after a few hours, the flaws of its mediocre shooting system begins to show... and it becomes repetitive (at least, for my taste), but! if grinding and keep looting stuff is your jam, then you'll probably have more a fun time than I have.
Steam User 7
Consider this basically a neutral review. Void Bastards isn't bad, it's just kind of there. The core gameplay loop - navigate to ships, loot them of raw materials and prefabricated parts, build new items, and progress main objectives - is fine. You've got some freedom in how you progress and which parts you want to specifically hunt versus craft. The game tells you what you're likely to face in any particular ship so you can bring appropriate tools and weapons. There's an equal mix of stealth, avoidance, and direct combat to juggle, since you don't need to - and often shouldn't - kill everything in your path. And sometimes you just have to turn and run and plan on getting the part you need on another vessel.
It just ends up feeling kind of samey as you go - while ships have generally different layouts, they're assemblages of various pre-fabbed and recurring sections and outside of which containers have items on this particular run, you've seen pretty much all of them within a few hours, same as the enemies themselves.
The presentation's fine, it's got a nice, dry sense of humor, and you pretty much know how it's going to work after your first main objective, but the game just keeps on going longer than it probably should. Roguelikes need a certain amount of variety and content to really build a satisfying gameplay loop, and VB just doesn't have enough of anything to really stand out and work the way it probably should.
Steam User 7
Only worth it on sale. A clean, crisp roguelike experience. Definitely a game that belongs in anyone's library for its standout presentation and performance.