![]() ![]() Now let’s look at another version of this. What that means is that jailer falls into his version of jail and the player can continue to scavenge on the ship unhindered. Instead, here you have other options, such as locking enemies into rooms by authorizing doors to lock, and by doing so you can hinder the enemy and potentially capture them. This isn’t like most first-person shooters where clearing the enemies and aggressively pushing against their line gets you the win. The point though is combat is a gameplay system, not a requirement or an end goal. I’ve done that a few times, and it works. So what’s the purpose of combat? The answer is simple, it’s the ability to give players agency and if they wish, they can clear a ship out. You have enemies who don’t reward you for combat, require a premium currency in the form of ammunition, and never get easier. ![]() That feels odd in some ways, you’ll earn new tools to deal with enemies but don’t gain dominance over challenging enemies. While they will get better weapons, and, eventually, rocket launchers, Screws never become a trivial confrontation. The player doesn’t become super powerful. The thing is, this isn’t that different in the end game. They’re just hulking enemies and if you’re stuck dealing with them, you’re probably going to have a bad time especially in the early game. They aren’t impossible but they’re going to use up a huge amount of your ammo, resources, life, and time all of those are important. The thing is, Screws are very hard to kill. With the name Screws, I always think jailors or security guards and that’s not a bad description. These are the big hulking guards who you won’t want to tangle with. In the early game, you will deal with enemies called “Screws”. So your ammo becomes a critical resource. If you run out of ammo for your weapons and items, you’ll have no combat abilities. Ammo is very sparingly given, and players are only allowed to bring a weapon from each grouping onto a ship. ![]() First, there’s no melee attack in the game and in the early game this feels like a major oversight, however, it’s a key to what’s going on here. So players will eventually start to ask themselves “Why should I attack enemies”, and this is a valid question.īefore we talk about the reasons for combat, there are more issues with an aggressive playstyle. While fighting enemies is interesting, enemies don’t drop items for the most part. The combat itself feels good, and this is a great first-person shooter. I’m sure some people might ask “How?” Combat in Void Bastards is … to put it in a single word, unrewarding. It teaches players how to not play aggressively. While many games push stealth or non-combat as the main goal, Void Bastards does something more important. The fact is, Void Bastards allows aggressive players but it doesn’t seem to want you to play itself in that manner. This is not how I normally play games, I like exploration but only safe exploration. If I needed a specific item, I could guess where these were. If I wanted to get fuel for my ship, I might rush to the engine room. I no longer cleared every ship, and by the end of the game, I often would choose to focus on specific objectives rather than risk combat. Void Bastards supports this idea, but after playing for a couple of hours, I noticed I wasn’t playing aggressively. The lack of danger is what I normally strive for before I think about my next move. I love rushing into a room or location, killing all the targets, and then spending my time exploring the location, if there’s the option for it or moving on to the next part of a game if there’s not. As a gamer, I’m a bit aggressive in my gameplay. With that out of the way let’s start with what I think is the biggest piece of Void Bastards’ appealing game design. At the same time, much of what I’ll be discussing about Void Bastards is not dependant on the rogue-lite genre and most would apply to rogue-likes or any genre. However, I just want to be clear if it sounds like I’m saying LITE and not LIKE, I am. That’s not the topic I want to bring up here, it could make for its video, which could allow me to finally talk about Nethack. These games don’t have a true permadeath system, pieces of the characters copy over and so on. These are Rogue-Lites, not a Rogue-Likes. The second issue is a war I’ve been conscripted in. Now it’s completely different in genre and style, but they are both roguelites and have some interesting similarities that should help illustrate how both games stand out. Two things before we begin, I’m going to also talk about a second game to compare to Void Bastards. But let’s talk about the game mechanics and design that make this game work. ![]()
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