I find it irresistible when a sport comes out of nowhere and surprises me. Earlier this month, that’s precisely what occurred once I noticed the trailer for VoidBreaker throughout Gamescom Opening Evening Reside. I downloaded the fast-paced sci-fi roguelike FPS shortly after seeing it, and never solely is it good, but it surely is likely to be among the best shooters I’ve performed all 12 months. And it was made nearly solely by one man, Daniel Stubbington.
VoidBreaker is an extremely quick and smooth first-person shooter obtainable now in early entry on Steam and Recreation Go PC. The sport is ready inside a big, extremely superior AI program that’s utilizing human check topics to assemble information on fight and warfare. This entails you endlessly preventing and dying time and again via “runs” of this system’s randomly generated gauntlets crammed with varied robotic enemies and different odd cyber-opponents. Fortunately, very early on, a earlier human who was making an attempt to flee this system contacts you to assist take the AI down and get out alive. Sadly, your ally is simply the digital stays of a really useless one who has a skeleton hiding in your cyberjail’s basement. However whereas he’s useless, his thoughts continues to be in this system and helps you hack the system, slowly unlocking everlasting bonuses and new weapons that will help you get additional throughout every action-filled run.
If a few of that sounds foolish, it’s! And that’s the purpose. VoidBreaker leans into the absurd and unusual scenario you end up in, with plentiful jokes delivered by a dry robotic announcer throughout runs. Messages embody this system explaining how dwelling ceaselessly in ache is best than dying, and the way you aren’t alone as a result of the AI is at all times watching you. It strikes that excellent steadiness between foolish and darkish that Portal nailed so a few years in the past.
One other run, one other run, one other run….
The gameplay loop of VoidBreaker will really feel fairly acquainted should you’ve performed any roguelike sport in the previous couple of years. Every run feels completely different, as enemy encounters and different sections of the digital gauntlets are randomly generated. As you progress via these runs, you discover mods of varied rarity ranges that offer you new skills, make you stronger or quicker, and even change how your gun works. And naturally, as in most roguelikes, there’s a forex you earn that may solely be used at retailers that randomly seem in your path throughout that run. There’s additionally a forex that permits you to unlock everlasting upgrades within the aforementioned secret useless man basement.
So yeah, nothing groundbreaking in Voidbreaker. As an alternative, the rationale to play this new FPS is for the gameplay and fight. Motion in VoidBreaker is extremely clean, snappy, and satisfying. That is the form of sport the place it’s simply enjoyable to run round and soar, even outdoors of a combat. And gunplay is equally implausible, with the assault rifle you unlock pretty early into the sport being a loud and hectic demise machine that sprays enemies with bullets in a manner that at all times makes me completely satisfied. Buildings and different buildings you notice within the ranges will also be destroyed à la Battlefield and crumble upon enemies, beautiful and even killing them. Oh, and you’ll choose up most objects utilizing a Half-Life-like Gravity Gun mechanic and fling them again at baddies, too.
As you improve your character throughout runs, including ice bullets, enhancing your Gravity-Gun-thingy, unlocking hearth assaults, and accumulating super-powerful grenade mods, the motion in VoidBreaker can turn out to be extraordinarily chaotic. At occasions, it turned practically an excessive amount of for my eyes to maintain monitor of as my rifle spat out electrically charged bullets coated in vitality fields, buildings collapsed round me, and enemies stuffed the sector with varied purple projectiles that may do a number of injury should you aren’t cautious. It may be lots, and I feel for some it is likely to be an excessive amount of. However I loved each second of it, even when there have been positively occasions once I was simply spamming my skills and grenades towards a large cloud of destruction and demise and hoping for the perfect.
However the chaos is a part of the enjoyable, and demise isn’t that huge of a deal in VoidBreaker. In any case, it simply gave me one other excuse to load again up in my bizarre, sparse cyber residence/jail and shortly say hello to the skeleton within the basement earlier than hopping again out for yet another run. I’m excited to see how the sport expands in early entry. Now, I have to go and play extra VoidBreaker. Only one extra run. I’ll go to mattress finally. It’s solely 2 a.m….
