![]() ![]() I think they were worried, perhaps reasonably, that their fanbase are too old and/or drugged up to notice an R going missing. Ion Fury used to be called Ion Maiden but then the band Iron Maiden got shitty and made them change it to something that doesn’t mean anything. And besides, playing a retro FPS on consoles is like driving a car in high heels and with socks on your hands ‘cos you needed somewhere to put them after you changed into the high heels. We don’t need a theme we’re super cas, fuck you. Hey, that’s also a retro-style sprite-based FPS and it also just came out on consoles, is this a theme? No. So let’s talk about another game I still haven’t finished, Ion Fury. ![]() Whereupon the “you done fucked up” music kicks in, everything starts darting about yelling at me in hilarious regional accents, I get flustered, cockups keep cascading, I blow my own legs off with a cluster bomb and frankly I just don’t want to keep playing as it’s upsetting to be constantly reminded of my last disastrous attempt at a workplace massacre.Īnd that’s why I didn’t play it long enough to review it properly, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me ‘cos we’re all super cas here. The procedural levels get very samey and after the difficulty ramped up I’d turn a corner and somehow six dudes would have all very procedurally decided to hang around the same coffee machine. And I wonder if Void Bastards has a similar thing going on, that it might be trying to evoke the central theme by making you feel like you’re trapped forever in a repetitive bureaucratic purgatory.īecause well done if it is, but I rapidly get sick of it. ![]() It makes me think of when people told me to give Pathologic a chance and I said it made me bored and confused and they said “That’s the idea! It’s a game designed to evoke the banality and confusion of being a sad Russian doctor that everyone wants to punch.” In which case I congratulate the excellent job it did realising those intentions but I’m still not going to play it anymore. The narrator makes us search the network of derelicts for the specific crafting items that will advance the plot, and the plot usually advances to “find another bunch of specific crafting items.” But after playing for a while, I had no idea what I was working towards, story-wise. I liked the cynical comedy tone and the way it effectively created this sense of being trapped in a forgotten sub-sub-butthole of a vast, hideous interstellar bureaucracy. So tonewise it’s what you’d get if you locked Borderlands in a succession of small restrictive maps and forced it to listen to Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy audiobooks while smashing its fingers with a hammer every twenty minutes.Īnd at first, I rather liked it. Void Bastards concerns a prison transport ship lost in some distant armpit of space where an AI voiced by the bloke who narrated The Stanley Parable who really seems to be cornering the market on faintly sinister budget Stephen Fry impersonations, thaws out a succession of prisoners to go aboard derelict vessels and loot them for resources and crafting materials while fending off a variety of insane mutant humans that keep yelling at them in overdone comedy voices. Ah, but Void Bastards has something else that helps it stand out as different to all the other indie games – it’s also a roguelite. Void Bastards is a first person shooter with retro-style graphics complete with sprite-based enemies, the kind of thing we’ll probably keep seeing a lot of in indie games until nostalgia trends move on from the retro FPS era to the age of post-9/11 neo-conservatism. And it just came out on consoles, so hey, this is almost relevant. So what did you play? Well, I did play quite a bit of Void Bastards, because the title drew me in with two of my favourite things – nihilism and swearing. Heyyy that’s cool with me ‘cos I’m super cas. Not really, I spent most of the week leaning on jukeboxes and making double finger guns at the sexy honeys. ![]()
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