Imagine being trapped in an endlessly repeating world where you’re constantly being harangued by an uncaring overseer, forced to do demeaning tasks for no apparent purpose or reason, and it seems to be your entire life’s purpose. However, unlike your “day job,” in VOID/BREAKER, you have a gun.
VOID/BREAKER applies the roguelike formula to the FPS, to wit: you endlessly respawn in a dystopian landscape that’s part woodsy office park and part full of killer robots and charge forward with a gun. Dying is okay, because the robot overlord controlling the test is happy to respawn you, but there’s another guy, who is already dead, but he is telling you there may be a way out, and all you have to do is charge forward, gunning down endless robots, upgrading your guns, searching for a way out, blowing shit up, and doing sick moves with your sword.
Think TRON by way of The Matrix, specifically any of the parts where Neo has lots of guns: No run is quite the same, except in the general roguelike formula: there are combat nodes, there are nodes with weird monoliths that can provide great rewards or do great harm, there are shopping nodes to buy upgrades, there are incredibly hard boss fights, there are loot nodes, and, of course, there are lots and lots of combat nodes full of aforementioned killer robots.
What kind of robots? They all have names, but some are vaguely human-shaped, some are floating orbs, some are scuttling bug types. Look, I’m not giving clankers a name. I’m pumping them full of bullets. Suffice to say, they’re all nasty, they’re all trying to kill you, and they’re all inhuman scum. The boss fights in particular produce that “oh NOW what?!” feeling you really look for as ungodly writhing…things come horribly floating towards you and you’re low on ammo and health, but goddammit, death to the robots.
Any game like this depends on its gunplay and its upgrades, and that’s where VOID/BREAKER shines. Starting from a humble pistol, there are upgrades that do everything from fire, ice, and poison to “your bullets shoot ninja stars” to “your guns no longer shoot bullets but instead rain down missile strikes in targeted areas,” many of which can be combined and upgraded if you find or purchase the upgrades. You can also throw a grenade, use a gravity tether to fling objects (many of which explode), use said exploding things and grenades to drop terrain on the robots, use your katana to chop up robots, do cool jumps, slides, and airdashes, and otherwise rock out while playing an electric guitar. Note: You can’t actually rock out while playing an electric guitar, but as you play and unlock stuff, you can currently get an assault rifle, shotgun, and marksman rifle to take on your adventures.
There’s also some “crafting”? “Inventory management”? To the guns, since they have a bunch of slots and you get mods, and some mods only apply in some slots and there’s a very weird and interesting directional system to the mods and slots, like “this upgrades the slots to the right but disables those slots to the left” or “this opens up new nodes above but closes nodes below.” Everything bolts onto your gun, and you can find all kinds of special attacks…but they are ammo-constrained, and you can only have one active at a time. All part of the trade-off.
There are a couple of really cool aspects to the design I want to call out: Since stunned enemies drop health and ammo, and since stuns come from doing sick stuff like hitting them with explosive stuff you grab from the terrain, you’re mechanically encouraged to do cool stuff rather than be cautious. The solution to low health is to run into combat rather than running away from it, since health upgrades are otherwise hard to come by. Always be shooting. Worst case, you start the run over.
Likewise, the room/node/whatever you call it structure of roguelikes works well because you have an intense fight, then a chance to breathe, then a choice of what to do, and while you have an idea what you’re going to encounter, you’re never going to be sure what’s coming.
Why VOID/BREAKER Already Stands Out
When it all clicks, good god. One run, I got a rocket mod for my pistol that made it shoot rockets instead of bullets, then a couple of grenade damage upgrades. This resulted in me barreling into fights like a maniac, throwing grenades and firing rockets everywhere, and jumping around like a lunatic, grenade-spewing Daffy Duck. Then I found a mod that partially reloaded my special rocket ammo every time I killed a staggered enemy, making me even more of a crackhead on meth, tactics-wise. Then I hit a low gravity room, like OH SHIT IS THIS A MODDED UNREAL TOURNAMENT SERVER YOU ROBOTS ARE DEAD?!
My advice: A: Always, B: Be, B: Bouncing around like a goddamn maniac. This is one of those shooters where if you stop to think, you’re dead, so don’t think.
It’s in Early Access now and developed by A Dude, and upcoming stuff includes: additional biomes, story content, new challenges, new modes, and more.” Can he finish it? It’s off to a pretty good start.
