Void Bastards

This one's a bit tricky to summarize. It's fun, well paced, unpredictably rewarding, and even offers moments of tension where you might lean towards your screen. The issue is that it's one of those games where the first 10 hours have a much better account for game play than the second half. I like what the latter half of the game has to offer but when you have a few jack-of-all-trades and an end-game health pool that won't let you die, you encounter the solution to this issue in the form of ridiculous compensation. Enemies that you'd never take on in your early game become the stock of the soup in the late game. They try to make up for this by making elite variants but these enemy types are just tougher and hit harder with a couple of minor tweaks to their attacks - nothing that changes your game plan though. I think that there's plenty here to give you as many hours to enjoy the game as US dollars it's asking for, which is a fair trade-off. But as soon as you figure out that upgrades and new weapons determine where the challenge moves, you'll find that the fun shifts with it. There's no point in returning to the stealth and tactical habits you learn at the beginning when run, gun, loot and heal becomes your bread and butter - and a repetitive recipe at that. This developer is great and I'll gladly hand them my money for some days of fun, but be warned that you'll probably develop your own opinions on the challenge curve once you start to actually kit yourself up. If I could change this game in some way, I wouldn't give health upgrades that dwarf enemy damage output so significantly, or add variants like radiation if the worst it'll do is pinch me before I eat the equivalent of a senzu bean back on my ship. The enemy variation DOES ask that you pick your weapon with more consideration than a wave of the hand, but - again, who cares if you can get most of your health back in one click of a button between missions anyway. TLDR; I like the depth of game play and I like that the game expects you to dive that depth to survive, but the band aids and shields they give you eventually become far too strong for their own good - pushing this from a game of tense scavenging and make or break combat to a game of simple decisions and upgrade overload hunting. If you're the kind of person that doesn't mind a late-game stagnation, then this is an easy buy. I can't help but think back on my time with this title fondly because it's a game that's fond of the player too. For me, I wouldn't say this comes close to one of my top 10 games, but it might be towards the bottom of my top 100. Looking forward to more of their work.

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.

Yeah, naw. I was so down for this, but it just does not play very well. The enemies are very tanky, the guns feel bad, the ships are samey and the loot is just not all that exciting. Real bummer.

Very good rogue-like FPS. The weapons and upgrades are nice however the game rewards you from skill and patience. Can be as long or as short as you want it. I messed around for a good while and still beat it in 22 hours. This is a must play for sure.

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.

Aesthetic and gameplay are solid. It took me about 10 hours to complete the main storyline. I found that there were derelicts that I would skip because I knew they were unwinnable and others that I would seek out because they were cake walks. The pirates felt unfairly difficult because I never found a weakness so I just avoided/torpedoed them instead. Jetting around the map felt good and strategic. I bought it on sale for a solid $1/hour of excellent entertainment.

I can't believe how not fun this game is... the graphics, the music, the sound, the humor, is all perfect, but man, the game itself just is so meh.

Not a good game unfortunately, close, but not worth the investment. Look at the playtime from many of the reviews and then compare this game to its peers. That's not a bulletproof way to make a decision here, but it's one signal worth considering since this is the genre of "replayability" and it is generally overpriced in comparsion.