Mycopunk

I went in expecting another co-op shooter dressed up in interesting clothes, and came out genuinely surprised by how many smart ideas Pigeons at Play packed into their debut. Mycopunk started life as a senior capstone project at the NYU Game Center, and that origin story shows in the best possible way: every system feels considered rather than copied, like a small team that asked "what do we actually love about shooters" before writing a single line of code. The four playable characters, Wrangler, Bruiser, Scrapper, and Glider, are not rigid classes. Each brings a distinct movement vocabulary to the battlefield. The Wrangler rockets and lassos forward, the Bruiser drops a hard-light shield and slams the earth, the Scrapper grapples with a jetpack, and the Glider locks on and launches healing or damaging rocket salvos from the air. Critically, characters are otherwise functionally similar, which means no one feels like a support role trapped behind better-armed teammates. The real depth lives in the upgrade system: a hexagonal grid where upgrades slot together like chemical compound diagrams. Standard pieces are compact; exotic ones sprawl across the board and modify how weapons fundamentally behave, homing the Swarm Launcher's pellets to your crosshair, for instance, rather than just nudging a percentage upward. It becomes its own puzzle before you even drop planetside. Combat itself is relentlessly fast. There is no stamina bar, no ammo hunting: firing your primary weapon recharges the secondary, forcing you to alternate in a rhythm that feels natural within a few minutes but rewards refinement over time. Enemies, fungal freaks with glowing weak spots under orb-shaped shells, have fully destructible limbs, and severed pieces can be picked up by other enemies and turned against you. That single mechanic alone keeps firefights unpredictable in ways that genre heavyweights with much larger teams failed to manage. Mission objectives span beyond simple horde-clearing: escorting payloads, connecting power cables across the map (which you can then grind like rail sections), shooting spy stations out of orbit. The mission design clearly draws from Helldivers 2's objective variety, and the difficulty system is generous: three separate swarm intensities stack independently against six difficulty levels, letting you dial in the exact flavor of chaos you want without the game punishing you for it. The caveats are real and worth naming. Solo play is functional but noticeably thinner; the game lives in co-op, and reviewers who tried higher difficulties alone found the enemy volume punishing without team support. At Early Access launch, enemy type variety drew some criticism as a potential staleness factor over long sessions, though the November Oxythane Breach update added new enemies, maps, and the Accelerator SMG, signaling that Pigeons at Play is actively building out the content slate. The absurdist humor, cockroach mission-givers, satirical megacorp lore, anti-capitalist bite borrowed from the Helldivers 2 / Lethal Company school, lands somewhere between genuinely witty and trying a little too hard depending on your tolerance for that flavor. The visual noise of the cel-shaded, saturated art style can also be disorienting for the first hour, though it clicks into place once you calibrate to it. For the right player, this is a compact, handcrafted experience built by people who genuinely love the genre. The studio is small, the road to 1.0 is roughly six months by their own estimate, and the Early Access state still shows some rough edges. But the bones are exceptional, and the upgrade grid alone will hold a certain type of player hostage for far longer than expected.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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