Voidling Bound Reviews

If I had to sum up the game in one sentence, it would be this: it feels like a promising game held back by its own design decisions. I don't regret buying and playing the game, but the cons outweigh the pros too much. There are only 9 Voidlings, 3 mission types, and both the campaign and endgame feel extremely thin. After reaching floor 60 of the Abyss, the game’s infinite tower-style endgame, I was left asking: “What’s the point?” By that stage, I had unlocked basically all Voidling evolutions and had a build that could probably push much higher, but there was nothing meaningful incentivizing me to keep going. There are also a lot of missing quality-of-life features, many of which feel so obvious that it makes me wonder whether the studio spent enough time playing their own game. The lack of polish really stands out. The Voidlings themselves have cool designs, but while actually playing as them, they lack personality. There are no satisfying impact sounds, mostly just the audio from your skills. The background music is either nonexistent or feels like random ambient noise, which makes the experience feel even flatter. There is potential for a lot of different builds, but because the endgame is so limited and punishing, where dying means losing a 60-minute run with nothing to show for it, the number of truly viable builds feels much smaller. I also think limiting players to only 3 perks is too restrictive; 4 would have opened up more interesting synergies. The game gives you tools to create fun builds, but then limits you too much to fully enjoy them. To summarize: the game has a lot of potential, but it feels like it needed another year in development. Everything is too limited, and it lacks the quality-of-life polish you would expect.

I liked the concept, which is why I bought this game. But despite having an interesting system for developing and mutating the local creatures, the game is boring. It’s boring primarily because of the small number of missions, and even those are quite repetitive. Playing on normal difficulty doesn’t require grinding, but if you suddenly want to switch your "creature" to a representative of another species, you’ll run into a lack of resources for upgrading. Another downside I’d like to mention is that the catalyst system only becomes available after completing the main story, and after that, there’s nothing left to do in the game. Yes, high-level "raids" appear, but they’re essentially the same missions from the story, which had already become tiresome during it. I’ll also note the local hub as a downside—every interaction in it triggers a loading screen with a fade-to-black, which is quite unpleasant visually. Personally, I think the hub is unnecessary and would be perfectly replaced by a 2D menu, which would also have fewer loading issues. The game is engaging for the duration of the playthrough, but the repetitiveness and the need to grind resources for deeper immersion into the creature modification system put me off. Since Steam doesn’t have a neutral rating, I’ll leave a negative one—more to draw the attention of interested players to the flaws. After all, there’s always hope that the game will be improved with updates.

Played about 9 hours of the demo in addition to the time played on launch. Great game that makes me feel nostalgic for games like Darkspore. Very addictive with some relative depth!

Spore with unethical gene splicing and animal fights Highly recommend!

pros : the game mechanics is fun. cons : it's way too short of a game. suggestion: add more missions, difficulties

10/10 game but they need to add a multiplayer game mode like pvp or just joint campaign with harder enemies.

This is a hard one. The actual game mechanics are a blast. The breeding is interesting on a surface level, the combat is great, and the visual style is a delight. But there just isn't enough to do. You'll hit end game within a few hours then it's literal mobile game time gates to pad gametime while you spend literal HOURS training and breeding monsters to run the endgame that is somehow less fun than the story. The endgame loop is: Finishing the story Running the same missions to farm mutagens and levels to get more parts for your creatures and make breeding even worth doing. It's like 4+ hours of end game farming till you can even start, there is literally no reason to bother till you can transfer at least 60% of the parents stats, otherwise the power increase is so small it doesnt even matter. Upgrading the training/breeding rooms, so you can spend like 18 minutes to bring a lv1 to lv20, and making it so when you breed they are not like 5% better than their parents Cycling training monsters for 18 minutes, running a single quick mission so they will breed, taking 2 of the babies, training them for 18 minutes, breeding the siblings, and repeating while you slowly bring the monster's stats up. This makes you a god monster that trivializes the end game and also exposes you to how hollow the end game is. There is literally no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ way im doing that again to make a monster that at best will be a slight bit better at clearing the end game than my first monster.

[h3] ~50 hours and still going [/h3] I waited to get more playtime before I reviewed and most of the negative reviews are people upset that the game isn't what they want. [b] It's a 3rd-Person Shooter / Creature Collector / Creature Breeding game...that's it. [/b] It's not a big story game, it's not a grand adventure that you're going to put hundreds of hours into the story. [b] That being said[/b], it is a very enjoyable and solid game for what it is designed to be. [b] Pros [/b] [list] [*] There's a lot of creature customization, appearance and abilities [*] Combat is fast but not overly frenetic. [*] The creatures are adorable [*] There's hidden items to look for and I personally enjoy that [*] Also some great Pop Culture references that I won't spoil [*] Enjoyable music soundtrack [/list] [b] Cons/Suggestions- [/b] [list] [*] The game is repetitive. Suggestion: More planets, more creatures, and interchanging abilities between different species or having generic abilities that can be used on all and then some species specifics. [*] Each species is strongly aimed at a specific playstyle. Suggestion: As above, increase the interchanging of abilities to expand on the options so players don't have to stick to a specific species for the playstyle they want if they want to play another because of appearance. [*] No Co-op at this time. Suggestion: My wife and I have paralleled this a lot and some of the abilities could be tweaked to allow co-op play. That would significantly increase the game longevity. Another option is for the developer to add mod support on a Steam Workshop. The game could be infinitely expanded with mod creatures, worlds, etc. [/list] [b] Final Thoughts [/b] There's still some bugs and a lot of potential. If you want to collect, customize your creatures, and smash enemies to your heart's content...then you'll enjoy this game. Just don't expect it to be something it's not. [h3] For the Developers [/h3] Great game and I appreciate your vision and look forward to see where your vision goes. My wife and I love it because there's a creature in the initial game that more or less match our favorite animals, moths and foxes. Keep up the good work!

8/10: Good clean fun! I love the art style and soundtrack. The gameplay loop is engaging and satisfying; I plan to milk lots of hours out of the endgame endless mode. Took me an afternoon to blitz through the campaign, but around 30 hours to 100% all achievements and collect every creature (including demo hours). My only real complaints are: 1. missing some small QoL features for pet/inventory management -- long Abyss runs net you 100+ eggs, but you can only open 5 at a time with an unskippable animation, then have to release extra Voidlings one by one, which can be tedious. And 2. I just wish there was more of it -- more missions, more creatures, more game modes. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely worth it for the money, but the game is short. If DLC ever drops to add more content, it will be an instant buy for me.

It's a good game, but lacking that extra touch. The core game loop (as in : collect monsters, level them up, breed them/customize them, level them up again, until you get the ultimate killing machine) is fun and the combat is good. But that's kind of where it stops. If a game was released in EA or beta with such a solid foundation, i would confidently say it could turn into a masterpiece. However, as a 1.0 release, i find it lacking in areas such as (going from most to least impactful) : - Mission variety : You basically play the same two types of missions all the time (either explore a biome, or survive in a spot) - Balancing : I would say out of the 9 species, only half of them are somewhat balanced ... the rest is either clearly overpowered, or just a complete slog to play with (and yes i'm aware you can make broken builds with pretty much all of them ... I'm not talking about those edge cases, but rather in terms of general power level) - World boundaries : The game does a good job at asking the player to explore places to find rare eggs, etc ... but a very poor job at making obvious where the world boundaries are, which can be a little bit annoying at times (aka you have two identical platforms, one you can jump on, while the other will count as falling) - Music : The music is not bad, but very repetitive and forgettable in my opinion - Animations & transitions : Some animations & animation transitions are not handled well which can make the game look a bit "cheap" or "clunky" So all in all, i give it a low 7/10. The foundation is solid, but it needs more work if it wants to keep the majority of players engaged for more than 10 hours. The demo is really nice though, so i'd recommend trying it out to get a good feel of the game if you're on the fence about buying it.