Mycopunk Preview
It seems like once a week, I start out talking about a game and its roguelike mechanics. Not this time. The subject is the new co-op shooter Mycopunk, and the dreaded R-word will not appear again. And just to explain the obvious, the name of the game comes from its mushroom-infested environments. As in mycology, the study of mushrooms, plus punk, an adjective which always adds a bit of badass style.
Strap In, Robot
Mycopunk is one of those games that puts fast action and fun at the top of its to-do list. Here’s the set-up: there’s a planet called Krask, orbited by a moon called New Atlas. New Atlas contains a valuable mineral called Saxonite, on which the moon’s booming economy is based. A monster and mushroom fungal infection threatens the moon’s prosperity, not to mention its inhabitants. That’s where you come in. As a robotic member of the New Atlas Hazard Crew, your task is to eradicate the fungi.
War and Peace it ain’t, but it’s just enough narrative density to generate Mycopunk’s retina-burning colorful world and mission design. Mycopunk’s environments lack textural detail but make up for it with a striking, comic book art style. Mushroom monsters and bio-mechanical enemies with glowing weak points are the main enemies. The levels are filled with them in escalating challenge, and equally dense with stuff to pick up, use, or haul back to your orbiting space station H.U.B. (Hub for the Undertaking of Business). Of course, one of the things you can do in the HUB is upgrade your weapons and abilities, using a DNA-like modular grid. There are a lot of cool synergies to play around with.
You have a choice of four starting characters/loadouts: Wrangler, the robot actor turned cowboy; Bruiser, great for crowd control; Scrapper, who darts around the arena with her jetpack; and Glider, a specialist in rockets and healing. They’re all equally fun in a group situation. Unfortunately, they all have some liabilities when trying to play solo.
Fluid Dynamics
I say they all have liabilities because generally speaking, Mycopunk is at its best as a four-person co-op shooter, where all the unique weapons and class abilities can work together. As my thesis explained, Mycopunk is not a roguelike, but a mission-based shooter, which means there’s no randomization of levels or enemies. There are, however, a variety of mission types and objectives, so everything isn’t just kill and survive.
Starting with the marketing materials through the narrative, game world, writing, and voice work, developer Pigeons at Play has infused Mycopunk with a great deal of cheeky absurdist humor. For example, your mission giver is a cockroach named Roachard Cox. I’d say the game tries a little too hard to either satirize — or embrace, I can’t tell which — the badass anarchist attitude so prevalent in shooters. In any case, its humor isn’t subtle.
Moment-to-moment, gameplay and action are fluid and often frantic in a sort of Serious Sam way. The guns feel pretty good to use, and there are lots of cool weapon effects. The demo I played didn’t highlight a huge number of enemies or missions, so I can assume that even the Early Access version will be quite a bit more expansive.
Promises, Promises
I also experienced a fair number of bugs and got trapped in the geometry more than once, not that it matters much in a game’s pre-release version. I’m also hoping that Mycopunk eventually shows more variety in its art direction and enemies over the course of the full game. The audio aspects could use a little work in terms of mixing and balance.
As a single-player shooter, Mycopunk doesn’t have a lot to offer in the long term and gets a bit repetitive. Where the rubber meets the road is in the co-op mode, where a quartet can gleefully work together to mow down waves of monstrous mushrooms and fungal machines. I’m looking forward to seeing how Mycopunk evolves in the coming months.
***PC code provided by the publisher for this preview***
