I don’t really care much about games focused on raising monsters. Hatching them, breeding them, evolving them, whatever, just doesn’t tend to appeal to me. However, after trying Voidling Bound‘s demo and experiencing its highly entertaining gameplay, I knew I needed to play this one. The game is overall on the simple side, and its campaign is quite short, but the gameplay is surprisingly awesome, and there’s a decent amount of value if you’re trying to have a team of powerful critters. As such, it’s very easy to recommend this one as long as its fast, flashy action and digestible systems appeal to you.
The basic gist is that you’ll frequently find eggs and mutagens in Voidling Bound‘s levels. The eggs hatch into one of nine alien creatures. By default, they have no elemental affinity whatsoever, usually (unless you find a golden egg, for instance), but you’ll find organic, fire, ice, electric, and plasma mutagens that are used to evolve each creature, which can normally evolve into one of two elemental forms. Doing this takes a certain number of mutagens for each form, with each evolution giving you improvements to a creature’s primary and secondary attacks, as well as a special perk.
Creatures can be levelled up all the way to level 20, with stat points being granted for each level. Eventually, you become able to breed two creatures of each species, and their offspring will inherit a certain stat point range. This is the only way to get creatures with high stats across the board, but it can also take a fair amount of effort. Interestingly, the game doesn’t at all require you to bother with this, as you can finish the eight or nine-hour campaign without ever really focusing on breeding. However, if you feel like it, there’s a fair amount of depth in this regard.
When you’re not evolving or upgrading your monsters (each species has its own skill tree with lots of upgrades to unlock, applicable to the entire species), Voidling Bound is an action game. It’s reminiscent of Warframe, honestly, and the different creatures have ranged and melee attacks. Most have a focus, such as the Kwipek, whose primary attack is akin to a rifle, and its secondary is like a grenade. Then there’s the Gilick, whose primary functions like a shotgun and secondary lets it do a leaping slam toward enemies, which is perfect for a quick melee follow-up.
There are a couple of melee-focused species (that are also incredibly fun to use) and even a couple of truly bizarre creatures, such as the Nimiod, which is a flying squid that automatically attacks every enemy within range of it when you hold the attack button. There aren’t a great many missions in the game, but they vary between longer stages where you follow a marker and fight a boss at the end, to survival missions that have varying objectives (survive a certain amount of time, fight a number of enemy waves, capture a certain number of enemy territories). Things can get a bit redundant, but the combat is so fun and the creatures so varied and interesting that it’s hard to take issue with this.
Once you beat the campaign, you unlock an endless rogue-lite mode that sends your chosen creature to random missions that have the chance to drop Catalysers, which are equippable perks that can make your creatures much stronger. This is where the real meat of the game is, plus you’ll need to actually breed stronger monsters if you want to make it to higher levels here (you lose everything you’ve accrued if you die in these instead of returning to your ship). It doesn’t end there, though, as you can also use a rare currency to manually change a creature’s appearance, elemental affinity, and abilities to anything you’ve unlocked, which you’ll do with each new evolution.
What this all means is that you’re going to need to spend a lot of time slowly breeding up monsters with better stats and then breeding them again until they’re maxed out. Then you’ll go in and edit their genes to make monsters just how you want them. It’s a pretty robust system, and Voidling Bound at least makes it incredibly simple to train each monster to max level thanks to the gym available in the ship hub. There are also other upgrades to unlock from most of the hub’s NPCs, plus they all have milestone missions with rewards. Just doing the campaign here certainly won’t take long, but actually doing all these missions and getting a maxed-level monster of each species will take a fair amount of time, so the game isn’t exactly lacking in terms of playtime.
It’s a remarkably unique, interesting system that I do quite enjoy, although I haven’t sunk my teeth into the breeding systems just yet. Mostly, I’ve just been having fun fighting the varying enemy types in the rogue-lite levels, as the combat really is the star here for me. I do wish there were more to the campaign, and the fact that plasma creature attacks are strong against every enemy type instead of how the others aren’t strong against everything really makes other elements feel less useful. Overall, though, this is a very compelling game that I’ve had a great time with, and it’s no wonder that it’s already drawn a fair amount of attention in spite of its clearly meagre budget.
Voidling Bound: While the campaign is short, the gameplay more than makes up for it, with lots of varied playable characters and plenty of monster-raising shenanigans. – Andrew Farrell
