There is certainly no shortage of roguelike big titles going around on Switch right now, with tastes of Dead cells, Enter the dungeon, Kill the Needle and the recent An unleashed fury just a few examples of the best of its kind currently available on the Nintendo console, and that of Blue Manchu Empty bastards is still other Strong addition to this range. It is a sophisticated and addictive sci-fi shooter with a wonderfully unique comic book style, a typically British sense of humor and a really haunting enemy design to face when you cross the bowels of ships procedurally generated spaceships looking for upgrades, loot and coins.
In Void Bastards, players play the role of an endless procession of dangerous prisoners aboard the Monolithic Arch of Void, a huge space prison whose inhabitants are now defeated one by one of their cryogenic dream by AI aboard the ship – BACS – to venture into the infamous Sargassum nebula, plundering enemy-infested ships in search of the essential components necessary to restart the ship Defective arch.
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Doing these desperate races in search of components forces you to keep your food and fuel reserves full, as well as to recover spare parts with which to improve your weapons and armor to successfully confront the various creatures that you will face against each other the others as you navigate the corridors of abandoned hospital ships, fiscal ships, psychological ships and frigates.
The main game loops here will be familiar to any roguelike fan; You will die several times as you try to advance more and more in the game, each time you die for that particular prisoner, and then start again, a task made easier by a handful of persistent elements that make you strengthen yourself with each failed career.
The scrap and spare parts collected on your outings are used on your workbench on board the Ark to unlock new weapons – this starts with a common pistol but will soon fire poisonous spikes and drop Bushwhackers and regroup your enemies as well as strengthen your armor and add a variety of blessings and abilities that make everything a little easier to survive.
The game loop here is inherently repetitive, but Void Bastards manages to keep things interesting by equipping every prisoner you inhabit with all kinds of random afflictions that impact your ability to successfully maneuver through the space glove deadly in the game. Sometimes your avatar will have a relentless cough that will alert enemies close to you while you sneak, you may have buttery fingers that randomly deposit your precious color blind garbage, making levels monochromatic, or even being delinquent acquaintance, ensuring that single-level hackable automatic turrets are always hostile towards you.
There are also positive traits, with better success rates, easier stealth, and increased strength that gives you additional health among the random positive benefits that can be attributed to you when you wake up from your cryo-snooze. It's a smart way to put a lot of variables in the mix, and with ships that often operate in different ways, it helps keep things fresh and fun when you cross Sargasso in your little living pod.
You will quickly find a rhythm in the way you progress in enemy territory while you manage the loops of the game, and we end up more or less the same plan over and over again: board a ship, steer straight to his rudder to Download a map full of enemies and loot sites, get a fix in the nearest oxygen room (you'll need to constantly monitor your air levels and your health here), then walk down the halls as carefully as possible, weighing the risks and capturing as much as we thought we could drive without being killed.
The game is generous by providing you with plenty of information on the number and types of enemies on board each ship before you moor, helping you weigh the dangers before you jump, and you will soon find yourself at find out if there is a particular reservation of Worth it. risk of fuel cans, food source or leveling.
On some roguelikes, this almost comfortable and reliable streamlined rhythm can be said to be negative, which makes the repetitive elements of the game even more repetitive, but Void Bastards manages to dodge it clearly by being rather short compared to most titles that we used. found in this genre (you can operate the campaign in about ten hours) and never Really have a chance to get tired of what's on offer here.
It's a refreshing and windy race time that gives you enough without getting bored or making you feel like you never see the end, something we face over and over with roguelikes. This does not mean that it is a easy
Gameplay: Enemies are dangerous and mistakes will be severely punished, giving a solid level of tension at all times – it's just not as long and long as many roguelikes, and it's much better for that.
Almost all aspects of Void Bastards are well designed and intuitive; There is still a lot of information available about missions, upgrade locations, enemies, etc. to help you get through Sargassum, so it may be a little disappointing that combat turns out to be the most basic and basic element. the game.
The shots offered are fairly straightforward – you can't aim your viewfinder, hide behind a person alized blanket or do sophisticated tactical stunts out of the woods. But
As you navigate abandoned spaceships here, you will meet Juves, janitors, ghosts, screws, tourists, outpatients and more, a diverse team of very strange enemies speaking with incredible British regional accents ( it often seems like you're trapped in space with a very angry Liam Gallagher), and the game draws a lot from his humor, as well as from the horror, attitudes of these marauding thugs when you associate with them.
We are almost certain that Void Bastards is the first time that an enemy sarcastically shouts "Good Barbara!" towards us when we miss them with a shot or we laugh at "I can see you, asshole" when one of them attacked us in combat. The various ships that you embark on are filled with these horrible thugs who keep chatting. absolute nonsense for themselves or launching a dirty abuse in their direction and, combined with the constant garbage that is transmitted by the tannoy speaker system of each ship, ensures that each mission in which you jump here is filled with equal measures of humor and horror.
The rather basic nature of combat is also somehow facilitated by certain intelligent systems that give things a bit of strategic momentum. Blue Manchu development team members worked on the original BioShock And you can feel this connection more clearly in the way your character can hack the turrets to knock them down and turn them against the enemy.
You can also close the doors, unless a ship's locks are deactivated at random, to control the areas where enemies can follow you, giving things a dynamic slightly like a puzzle. If there is a dangerous screw between you and the airlock, for example, you can remove it, forward it to another area, then lock it to ensure your route to a safe place.
There are also multi-level BioShock-style vending machines that offer you several advantages in exchange for credits or spare parts; we like to use the coffee machine of a ship that sees its damage production increase dramatically for a while, and although none of this is Verry much in depth or strategically, this is enough extra to strengthen this basic combat and keep it interesting.
Regarding this Switch port, Void Bastards looks and plays almost identically to the other versions of the game we have dived into before; However, there have been a few occasions when the frame rate has experienced slight difficulty during the busy action sequences. It doesn't happen very often, and when it does happen, it's fleeting, but when the screen goes crazy with action, you can sometimes experience the strange drop here and there.
In addition to that, we found no bugs or other problems with the game; It & # 39; sa great roguelike port that looks and sounds fantastic in anchored and portable modes. The game's DLC, Bang Tydy, is also available for pickup at launch, and makes it all the more difficult, by adding a new vacuum pistol, new ship models and a few evil robots who like to suck up their precious supplies. oxygen.