Voidling Bound PC Review
Summary: Voidling Bound offers silly repetitive fun, especially if you have ever wished you could control your turn-based creature battlers directly, 3rd person shooter style. I had a great time, and whilst I'm sure mileage might vary, I recommend giving it a go.
4
Sci Fi creature battler ARPG
I had a great time with Voidling Bound. It was just plain fun. Sometimes repetitive and mindless – but consistently fun. Games like this make me ashamed of each Pokémon game I buy, given how frustrating their lack of evolution across generations has been – and in comparison how much better Voidling Bound feels and looks. If you’re looking for a good time, but not a long time, I recommend giving it a crack. And who knows, you might catch the grinding bug.
You play as a “Space Wrangler” – immediately shortened to ‘Wrangler’ as though that is somehow cooler…and you directly control “Voidlings” in battle. If you’re anything like me, you’ll probably think of Pokemon in space – and you would be wrong. Yes, you catch and collect Voidling critters, store them in implausible null space like Bill’s boxes, and they grow stronger as you train them in battle.
But this is not turn-based, nor anything like a JRPG. One of my favourite childhood games was ‘Unholy War’ (1998, PS1) – and it was bloody amazing. I’ve always longed for something like it, and nothing has ever scratched the itch. But Voidling Bound is at least one step closer. Each mission starts with a ‘neural bond’ cinematic that I am sure is just an artful loading screen – during which you leave your own body and mindjack your creature. You literally play as the creature you have hatched and trained, running around in third-person ARPG style, spamming skills as you clear the screen of enemies.
The story didn’t matter too much to me (but neither did the story in any Pokémon game after Gold/Silver). The tone felt like a cross between Outer Worlds and Babylon 5, setting up a grand battle for survival of the human race and all life in the universe, facing destruction from the omnipresent parasitical “Lesion” (can’t help but wonder if they got that from legion). As much as I didn’t particularly care about it, because I was having fun it didn’t really bother me that the story felt skeletal.
The game is kind of beautiful running at Epic settings – albeit the environments struck me as a little lifeless, but maybe that was only in comparison to the Voidlings and enemies. The Voidlings themselves look great in a ridiculous kind of way – simultaneously cool and silly. And maybe that would matter more if you spent most of the time actually looking at them, you know, like in a turn-based battle. But I think 90% of my playtime was spent in combat, and for all of that time I was looking at the back of each Voidling’s head – and by ‘looking’, I mean I didn’t even notice the Voidling because I was busy targeting each enemy and deciding skills to use.
Steam Deck is another story – it lags, stutters, jumps, graphical quality is reduced (not enough to bother gameplay in my experience), but what’s really annoying is the prolonged loading times for each level during an unskippable ‘neural bond’ cinematic. I enjoyed my time on Deck, but nowhere near as much as on PC with controller. Although it is worth me mentioning that there is something really wrong with the targeting controls – I had to keep switching to other games I’m playing right now to test myself – and I’m certain it’s not me. Didn’t matter if I was playing mouse and keyboard or controller, there is some strange sticky delay with targeting – once I adapted to it, accounted for it, it didn’t stop me shredding my foes. But the first hour of play had a horrible ‘hand feel’.
The missions are simple – you are ‘cleansing’ an environment by destroying goo with your projectiles; or clearing waves of enemies, etc – whilst collecting resources to upgrade your Voidlings, both as a species and as individuals. There is minimal depth, almost no complexity, and my perception of the difficulty was that it mostly related to bullet sponge enemies, or type-matching (fire, cold, organic, etc).
Final Thoughts
And maybe it was because of my unholy nostalgia for ‘Unholy War’-style gameplay, mixing with my deep-seated nostalgia for creature collectors in general ever since hours of Pokémon Red in the backseat of the car on road trips… but somehow despite the simplistic repetitive gameplay, doing the same thing again and again with stupid looking cool monsters in a lame story – I liked this and kept having fun longer than I expected. I really hope Hatchery Games add more monsters, more variety of gameplay, and fix whatever the hell happened to their camera and targeting controls – because if this game had depth, it might end up being one of my regular evening rotations. I strongly recommend Voidling Bound if you are a sicko like me; and if they keep updating it, you might get even more from it – 4/5 stars.
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