Void Bastards

Void Bastards is a first-person shooter wrapped around a resource-management roguelite, and the combination lands more often than it has any right to. Blue Manchu drew obvious inspiration from BioShock and System Shock 2, but the actual loop feels closer to a turn-based strategy game where the turns happen to involve shooting things with a jury-rigged nail gun. Each run, you pilot a prisoner through a procedurally generated map of derelict spaceships, deciding which hulks are worth boarding based on what you need versus what threats are docked inside. That meta-layer of route planning is where the real game lives. The crafting and resource economy is tight in the best sense. Food, fuel, and supplies are always scarce, and the game forces prioritization constantly. Do you board the ship guarded by Janitors - arguably the most annoying enemy in the game - because it carries the components you need for the Teleporter Beacon? Or do you route around it and accept a longer path? Every prisoner you control has random quirks that modify how they interact with those systems, and when they die, you move on to the next one. Death resets your character stats but not your crafted gear or nebula progress, which is a generous design choice that keeps frustration manageable without removing the stakes entirely. Weapons range from the basic Zapper and Boltgun to weirder tools like the Mungus Grenades and the Killbeams, and learning which weapons solve which enemy types is genuinely satisfying. The combat is not especially deep by FPS standards - movement feels intentionally deliberate and the aiming is forgiving - but that is partly the point. Void Bastards is not asking you to outshoot it. It is asking you to outplan it. The shooter mechanics exist to resolve the situations your planning failed to prevent. On that level, the balance mostly works, though veterans of pure shooters may find the gunplay underwhelming in isolation. The art direction commits hard to a British comic-book aesthetic, all thick ink outlines and flat colors, with enemy designs that are genuinely funny without tipping into annoying. The writing lands its dry humor consistently. Where the game shows its limits is in mid-run pacing: once you understand the meta-strategy, individual ship layouts can feel repetitive around the halfway mark, and enemy variety does not scale interestingly enough in the back third to keep the tension high. The AI is functional but not smart, which matters less here than in a pure action game but still flattens some of the tension in late-game boards. For strategy players who want something lighter than a Paradox campaign but heavier than a standard roguelite, this hits a real gap in the market. The tutorial is brief but the systems are readable, and the difficulty curve is humane enough that newcomers to the subgenre can get their footing before the nebula starts throwing genuinely nasty ship combinations at them. Mod support is limited compared to deeper strategy titles, so what you see is largely what you get at launch. Still, at roughly ten to fifteen hours for a full run and solid replayability from the randomized prisoner quirks and ship layouts, there is real value in the package. If the System Shock DNA appeals and you want something you can finish in a week rather than a semester, this delivers.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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