Voidling Bound

Shout out to dev for cleaning up a miss understanding.

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Game Good! Want new content!

TLDR: Voidling Bound is a game that would have felt complete in 2011. It is, put simply, a perfectly serviceable experience that you can play from Start to Finish without any of the updates, as of its 1.0 launch. As far as I am aware, there is no central server, no need to phone home beyond Steam’s validation of your copy, and therefore, it is perhaps the best game of the last 10 years to come out of the Single A or Double A not-quite-Indie but not-really-big game developer studio space. It takes heavy inspiration from a plethora of games (in particular, Dark Spore), and features enough content to comfortably fill 20-40 hours for its asking price. Get this game, it is a perfectly competent monster collector / grind-a-thon experience. --- Much of Voiding Bound could be described as a mission-based Action Adventure Creature Collector. That is certainly true as you work through the main campaign missions: doing specific hand-made levels with various objectives, leveling up and unlocking new creatures, mutating them with items recovered during missions, and then returning to collect secret eggs and hidden resource nodes, or accomplish mission-specific challenges such as speed-runs for completion rewards. There’s always a carrot on a stick, even 80 hours in, I’m still trying to perfect my bullet-chicken build and experimenting with options as I play the infinitely-replayable Rift Dives which you unlock at the very end of the Campaign, which itself is perhaps the ‘point’ of the whole game. But Voidling Bound is anything but a Loot Grind ARPG thing, it’s much more like a hybrid of Action Adventure Platformer with shooter and hack-n-slash minute by minute gameplay, only really earning any semblance of ARPG terminology due to its 3-ability / melee / dodge action system. One might think that Jumping and Sprinting are also part of the actions, but if we take all gameplay elements from the player in mind (including aiming and movement), there are basically 9 total actions in the game: Move, Shoot, Aim, Jump, Dodge, Melee, Ability 1, Ability 2, Ultimate Ability (Ability 3). This formulae despite being quite simple does give you some pretty dynamic options with some of the best critters in the game having dramatically different playstyles. More critters are expected to come later this next year which is extremely exciting to me. Enemies by expansion are somewhat limited, there’s a half-dozen enemy types I recognize, mixed between melee runners, shooters, flying shooters, and some bosses. There are Four Factions and Five Elements, of which only one element (Plasma) equally damages all factions; meaning your Element Type influences which Factions are easier to defeat, and in grander-terms when you unlock Gene Splicing, what types of creature abilities you want to equip. Gene Splicing is unlocked somewhat late into the game, it opens an entire new power curve because prior to that you’re only getting one creature ability when you cap-out a creature’s mutation tree at the end of a branch. It takes quite a bit of time to unlock everything, I want to say the middle 20 hours of my 40hr playthrough was spent grinding out all of the branches. There is also Breeding, and unfortunately the current management system of your creatures is a little barebones and in need of UIX overhaul; as you play you will get critters that have unique bonuses to one of their five attribute scores, ranging from +1/+3/+5; with Breeding you can mix and match these bonuses too, a +1 Strength and +3 Agility creature can breed, and you might get new creatures with +3 Strength and Agility if you breed them for long enough. It can be a little exhausting chucking armfulls of bullet chickens out of the spaceship when you’re fishing for your first stat-enhanced hybrid, but eventually you’ll get a system in place to organize and manage the substantial number of bullet chickens whose inferior attributes result in them being dashed upon the jagged rocks of the Greek coast. There are some other systems in the game to discover for yourself, but the core of the game is an Action-Adventure shooter with platform and monster-collector / optimizing features. It’s fun, and once you find a build within a creature that you like, you’re unlikely to need to meaningfully alter it until you complete the campaign missions and unlock the Rifts. Those Rifts are substantially more difficult than the base missions (on average) because they’re more attrition focused, meaning you might not be able to do them all that well until you unlock multiple forms of HP regeneration. It is end game content, and seems to be the direction the team is foraging ahead within. I just hope they consider looking at a DLC in the future to do more missions and expand the narrative (while nothing to write home about, I want to see what their writers can do with the material). I also think the game’s missing some kind of revitalization / conservation mechanic to reward players for releasing all of the mutant chickens that barf explosive plasma, and maybe more mutations and ways to alter stats would be good. Something missing from the base game is also that each creature is only different in how their body attributes and offensive abilities vary; all other stats are identical from creature to creature nearest I can tell, meaning the armored-looking laser beetle is just as squishy as the starter bullet chicken, when both have their Health Attribute at equal value. Some mild +1’s each critter has or even dare I suggest, a stat array system per-critter type, could really help add to the unique feel. I think it’d be cool to have the species grant say, +1 and +3 to two specific attributes that synergize with its base abilities. But player suggestions are like Space Chickens, very easy to look at for five seconds and safely discard off the cliffs of Greece. Fun game, excited to see whatever is next, not that it really needs a ‘next’, the game is a complete experience. FUN EVEN. Shocker.