The setting’s name is a reference to Charles Fort’s ‘Super-Sargasso Sea’, a hypothetical dimension that lost things disappear tohave much room for cleverness. Why
waste time leading a monster into
a trap, while they shoot you all the
while, if you’ve only got five minutes
to loot the ship? Why spend valuable
merits turning a turret to your will for
the sake of securing a room you’re
going to spend 15 seconds in?
Null and void
That’s not to say there’s no space
for tactics at all, but mostly excess
cleverness simply blows through your
time and resources to little gain. The
most efficient progress is made by
simply legging it through the corridors,
killing anything you can and belting
past anything you can’t while grabbing
every bit of loot in sight like you’re on
an interstellar Supermarket Sweep.
It’s a strategy Void Bastards should
have done everything in its power
to discourage you from, because it
makes a fast-paced FPS out of a game
with at best serviceable shooting,
pretty uninteresting objectives
and enemies that, while not often
especially difficult, are almost
universally annoying – a menagerie
of flying swarms, teleporters, mine-
layers, and shield-bearers.
And that’s not helped by an
overarching structure that makes
the key mistake of forgetting that
making you do repetitive, frustrating
tasks as a joke is still fundamentally
repetitive and frustrating. In service
of the game’s wryly labyrinthine
bureaucracy, you’ll scour the nebula
for innocuous items, such as a printer
or a telephone, only to discover that
actually those didn’t work, and now
you need an ice pop and a bottle of
lubricant instead. The entire game, in
fact, is a Sisyphean fetch-quest with
no payoff. It’s disappointing given how
enthralling the setting is – couldn’t we
have spent our ten hours uncovering
the unanswered mysteries of the
Sargasso Nebula instead?There’s fun to be had in sprinting
around Void Bastards’ run-down ships,
chuckling at its barrage of gags and
marvelling at its truly gorgeous art. But
it feels like you’re playing one game
in the shell of another, a quick-and-
dirty FPS scuffing up the corridors
of the smart, strategic sandbox the
developers saw in their heads, but
weren’t quite able to bring to life. ■rOgue
TrOOper
the game has
permadeath, similar
to a roguelike – each
timeyoudie,youtake
controlof a new
convict.in practice,
however, you lose
little, as all your
weapons,upgrades
andupgradeparts
carryover.each
character does have
their own randomly
generatedtraits,and
a fewof thesecanbe
game-changing.we
find that deaths strike
an awkward
middle-ground,
though – they’re too
unimpactful to add
much tension, but
frustrating when they
happen at an
awkward moment, or
after you’ve lucked
into a fun combo of
convict traits.“You’ll scour
the nebula for
innocuous items
such as a printer
or a telephone”
farlefT
‘screws’filla
big Daddy-like
role as some of
the toughest
enemies.
righT There are
loads of
weapons, gadgets
and upgrades for
you to craft.oXMverDict
afast,scrappyfPS
with gorgeous art
that’s sadly much
less than the sum
of its parts.6
lefTcomic panel
cutscenes are
great fun, but
the story goes
nowhere.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm the official xbox magazine 077review