Voidling bound is equal parts creature collector and action shooter, with critters as adorable as they are deadly. It’s kind of like Pokémon meets Spore. The mix makes sense when you realise that developer Hatchery Games was founded by Skylanders and Borderlands alumni.
It plays like an old-school action-adventure game and features a massive list of customisation options for your voidling pets.
A Hostile Environment
Voidling Bound is all about saving the universe from a plague-like corruption. Your crew of scientists land on alien worlds and cleanse the contamination with the help of the local fauna.
The game is split into two types of play. At your base, you can talk with other scientists, upgrade your Voidlings, and even breed new ones. Then, you pick a critter and jack into it like Neo in The Matrix… Whoa. You take over their body and use their formidable power to complete missions. As you explore worlds, you can find new voidling eggs to hatch back at base and add to your collection.
When in control of the voidlings, I was taken straight back to the action-adventure games of old. I felt bits of Jack and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank in the combat; with lots of jumping, dodging and dashing around. Depending on your voidling, you might be shooting at enemies from range, or going in for close quarters melee, all the while managing your ability meters and firing off big destructive ultimates.
Bosses have a bullet-hell type design to them and can actually be quite a challenge. Thankfully if you die, you keep everything you’ve collected and can level-up your voidling and try again.
Hatching Friends
Voidling customisation is where the games’ meat is. Each of the nine voidling species you find can be evolved through their own branching tree. Many of the decisions are binary — for example, do you want fire or poison damage? You might evolve your creature to be more suited for long-ranged damage, hurling flaming bolts and leaving destruction in their wake, or perhaps lean into a tankier build for maxium survivability. With each decision creating a new branch, it results in over thirty final evolutions per species!
You can customise your pets further through splicing; mixing and matching abilities, body parts, and perks from the variety of voidling evolutions you’ve already unlocked. It’s a really deep system that rewards exploring the variety locked within each evolution tree… You can make some truly adorable monstrosities!
Things I love about Voidling Bound:
• Creature designs are incredibly unique.
• Customisation is very deep.
• A tonne of replayability with different voidling evolutions.
• Cleansing the environment with the help of friendly creatures is great.
• Being able to pet all of the critters.
Things I don’t love about Voidling Bound:
• Lack of voice acting and animations for NPCs.
• Audio is generally good, but the soundtrack is repetitive.
Is Voidling Bound worth your time?
If you like a bouncy, colourful romp through an alien landscape, then I think you’ll love Voidling Bound. The loop of hatching creatures, unlocking new abilities through evolution, and going out to fight more corruption is fun and addictive.
Voidling Bound is out now on PC.
A copy of Voidling Bound was supplied by the publisher.
