Warping on to the first ship, the player viewpoint was virtually on the floor, reaching for door controls was a bit of stretch. This had me chuckling straight away due to the sheer absurdity of the entire situation. In fact, so short that their criminal mug shot was just a pair of hands holding a nameplate. The character that was generated had one defining attribute, they were very short. After a particularly bad run with a witless convict, I returned to the prison ship to get another hapless volunteer. I’ll lastly describe probably one of the silliest and downright belly laugh-inducing episodes I ever had in all my years as a gamer. The time spent aboard the rusting cargo ship had to be in pure stealth mode as all she had to defend herself was harsh language and a couple of mines. One mission She picked the empty staple gun instead of a fully loaded pistol. This was ok when she had a limited arsenal, but it soon got problematic when she had several guns to choose from. Prone to forgetfulness, she would often bring the wrong weapon loadout when boarding a new vessel. My next felon also had a tricky trait which on the surface did not seem to be so severe. I feel this is a great advertisement for the perils of real life tobacco consumption. On clearing his throat, all hell would let loose. I found to my displeasure he would do this at the most inopportune times, whilst sneaking past guards. My first con was a smoker! This meant that he would occasionally cough. The bad or flawed attributes are hilarious and very imaginative. Faster speed, better shooting accuracy and so on. Each new lawbreaker will have positive and negative traits.

The sheer amount of RNG regarding the character composition is wonderful and inventive.

So each new jailbird has a bit more of chance in gaining his or her liberty. All the weapon upgrades and scrap items are saved and returned to the prison ship. As a void bastard, you are expendable and your numbers are limitless. luckily, this is a non-issue in this game. Death comes quickly to the unprepared and unfortunate. By warping from ship to ship you can scavenge items and replace your dwindling stocks of food and fuel. You start off with the bare minimum in terms of weapons and supplies. Your mission is to navigate the cluster of spaceships in the Sargasso Nebula to gain your freedom. The meat of the story is pretty straight forward. Thankfully the Irrational studios DNA is alive and kicking, even after a few minutes into this space adventure, I knew I was going to a have a good experience. These features should hopefully be the core components of this new project. The games mentioned are landmark titles, which introduced many concepts with are now staples of any good modern game design document: inventory management, crafting and exceptional voice work. Now I’ve got that off my chest I feel cleansed and ready to describe my feelings towards this title.Ĭoming from some of the folks who gave us classics such as BioShock and System Shock 2, Void Bastards has a lot to live up to. It’s above all this white noise, which should be left in some dark corner of Reddit, for keyboard warrior pedants to argue about.

Before I go deep into my review of Void Bastards, I’d like to draw a line under the whole “whats a roguelike, what’s a rogue-lite kerfuffle” This game doesn’t need to be drawn into a petty squabble about semantics and definitions of genres.

Void bastards review