Gideon’s Perspective
Voidling Bound is what you would get if you took Risk of Rain 2 and mixed in a little bit of Spore, Monster Rancher and a hair bit of old school PlayStation 1 Platformers. The end result is an amalgamation of ideas that is both charming, and sadly, barely coherent.
You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!
I think ultimately such a blend turned out to be a bit too ambitious for the achievable scale of Voidling Bounds shoes. While the core of both the shooting and the breeding work well, they are very shallow, and the games balance is practically nonexistent, which puts a damper on the whole endeavor.
In Voidling Bound you take on the role of a Wrangler, a Voidling Breeder that can mentally link with Voidlings allowing you to control them in battle against a parasitic infestation that threatens the whole galaxy. Several species of Voidling exists and you can speed run and guide their evolution through elemental essences, gene splicing and good old selective breeding. Unfortunately, Voidling Bound doesn’t give much in the way of incentive to truly into dive any of it.
| Gideon’s Bias | Voidling Bound Information |
|---|---|
| Review Copy Used: Yes | Publisher: Hatchery Games |
| Hours Played: 15+ | Type: Full Game |
| Reviewed On: PC using a Gamepad | Platforms: PC |
| Fan of Genre: Yes | Genre: Third Person Shooter, Monster Breeding |
| Mode Played: Hard | Price: $24.99 |
Monster Shooter
Taking control of a Voidling feels one part Risk of Rain and two parts like old school Spyro the Dragon, or Jak & Daxter. If you’re an older gamer, the wave of nostalgia is undeniably there. The shooting and platforming mechanics are solid too. Each Voidling has a set of abilities that govern how they attack, evade or otherwise feel. The dodo like Kwipeck is rapid fire shooter with a dodge move, while the melee focused Ur-Sek gets in close with melee strikes, spits bile and can charge forward while blocking projectiles. All Voidlings also have an ultimate an ability that charges up overtime.
In total there are 9 types of Voidling, but each type is further augmented through evolutionary trees by using elemental essences, making for a variety of subspecies that ventures into the triple digits. These variants alter both the appearance and capabilities of the Voidlings. Perhaps a volcanic Kwipeck trades its fast fire rate for slower explosive fireballs for example.
Missions tend to come in two variety’s, a wave-based survival arena, and free form platforming adventures. In the latter you can explore to search for extra goodies, such as golden eggs that hatch into special Voidling variants.
The combat is a fast-paced bullet storm where you will be dodging plenty of projectiles while also dealing with melee-oriented foes. It’s solid but the leveling system can also make it feel strange. Voidlings level from 1 to 20 and combat for me, even on higher difficulties tended to bounce between two extremes. If I was under-leveled, everything felt spongy and could kill me in just a couple of hits. Matching or over leveling a mission would lead to me obliterating everything with a mere glance. There was rarely an in between.
There’s also not a lot of depth to the combat between individual Voidlings. Sure, some abilities vary to a degree, but you are largely just pointing and shooting or mashing the melee button while avoiding damage. It’s to the games credit that most missions are relatively short, allowing you to switch to other Voidlings for the next mission for some variety…In theory at least. The breeding and progression system don’t truly incentivize that variety, at least at first.
Void of Balance
The creature raising aspect of Voidling Bound is broken into four major components. The first is collecting and using elemental essences to evolve a Voidling down one of several paths.
These paths change a Voidlings appearance, alter abilities and changes their element. Different factions are weak to different elements. The final stage of an evolutionary path also grants a special mutated perk. This aspect is definitely one of the games stronger points. It’s exciting to collect enough essences to unlock a new path and see what types of new abilities come with it.
The second component is the skill tree. Each species of Voidling has a skill tree that you can spend DNA points to empower their abilities, this tree affects every Voidling of that species, so if you unlock a skill node in the Kwipeck tree, it affects all Kwipecks. An unfortunate side effect of this is that early in the game you are going to invest into the skill trees of the species you have access to, and later species are end up being quite weaker out of the gate until you also invest DNA points into them. This inadvertently incentivizes you to stick with earlier species rather than playing with a bigger variety.
Next is the breeding itself. You can find eggs during a level and also breed two matching species to try and pass the better stats of their parents to their offspring. Breeding is all about the stats and is pretty straight forward.
Finally, is gene splicing, this uses a special resource that allows you to fully customize a Voidling except for the stats. Through splicing you can pick from any appearance options, colors, abilities and elements for that species, AND give it up to three mutated perks from any evolutionary paths you have unlocked from ALL species. The only downside is that you can’t breed a spliced Voidling.
So, the end goal is to unlock as many Evolutionary paths as possible while breeding the highest stats possible to splice the magnum opus of each species. It’s a worthy goal and one that is almost interesting, except the game wears out long before that point and the splicing doesn’t really feel necessary to succeed.
This is really showcased in two big problems. The first is the wonky leveling system. Missions and Voidlings can have levels between 1 and 20, and you can earn XP from battle. You will never do this, as there is little point. Instead, you unlock gym equipment that can level your Voidlings up, all the way to max level, and it is way faster than trying to do it manually.
My trek through the campaign was just me matching the highest-level Plasma Voidlings I had to the mission. Which leads to another problem. The games balance is largely nonexistent. I mentioned before that different factions are weak to different elements. As far as elements go there is bio, fire, ice, cyber and plasma.
Plasma however, is effective against all factions. This gives you little reason to actually use other elemental Voidlings, especially when multiple factions start showing up at once. Technically other elements are considered super effective against specific factions, rather than just effective, but the tradeoff is that they are ineffective against other factions, where plasma has no such weakness.
In my particular play through, the scales of balance tilted even further. I had unlocked a specific Plasma Ur-Sek whose mutated perk caused life leeching projectiles to spawn from him. In the Ur-Sek’s skill tree, there is a node that also gives it life-steal on melee attacks. This Ur-Sek became nigh unkillable to a broken degree, and I had little reason to use or even breed anything else.
I didn’t acquire this Ur-Sek by doing anything cool, it’s not like I discovered an awesome combo through gene splicing. It just sort of fell into my lap. I played other Voidlings for review purposes, but I had largely felt like I had “won” the game just a couple hours in.
Once you beat the campaign, you unlock a procedural rogue-lite style mode called the Abyss where you take on a gauntlet of levels with the choice of pushing your luck and continuing onwards after each fight at the risk of losing any rewards you earned or going home. It’s a valiant attempt at adding a viable end game for breeding and splicing but it ultimately fell flat for me. The depth of the combat just is not there to sift through upwards of a hundred consecutive levels as a single Voidling.
Furthermore, any attempt I made at splicing didn’t come anywhere near the power of the Ur-Sek I acquired on accident. Plasma was once again the best option since every faction shows up in the Abyss. I gave it a good try with a few Voidlings and when I took in my super Ur-Sek, I just grew bored at the endless deluge of enemies while they could hardly tickle me. The depth just isn’t there, and neither is the game balance.
I also sadly believe I discovered a rather nasty bug. You can find golden eggs in certain levels which hatch into unique Voidlings that you can’t obtain otherwise, complete with special mutated perks you can splice on to other Voidlings. The first few I found were unique, but then several started giving me Argon Nimiods, effectively locking me out of the specific Voidlings they were supposed to be. Hopefully it’s patched at launch, but it definitely soured my waning enthusiasm even further.
Verdict
Voidling Bound certainly has the charm of old school platforming games and entices you with the idea of collecting a ton of Voidling variants to splice the ultimate creature. But it ultimately squanders its potential with shallow gameplay and a severely unbalanced game system.
The Abyss is a cool idea for an endgame mode, but the core gameplay simply isn’t meaty enough to maintain it, and the breeding and DNA splicing lost their luster when I unintentionally discovered an incredibly broken Voidling just by playing.
The bones are there and the core concept is intriguing. Unfortunately, Voidling Bounds execution left me unimpressed and pining for a better monster breeding game altogether.
