You’ll be given over-arching, chapter-based objectives, which require a specific set of materials to craft. Unfortunately, your ship has taken on some substantial damage, and you’ll need to scrounge up the bits and pieces needed to fix it from the various other ships floating around in space. Void Bastards has the player commandeering a crew through the Sargasso Nebula in order to get to… well, whereever they need to go, I suppose.

With that said, does this strategy shooter make for a good experience, when all is said and done?

However, the strategy elements are imposed by the game’s roguelike structure, which ultimately informs the gameplay cycles. But what sort of strategy needs to be applied when it’s one man versus the entire universe? Do the same rules apply when your enemies are legions of shambling undead, or worse? Void Bastards asks this very question, claiming to be a “revolutionary new strategy-shooter,” and in some ways, it is different from your standard fare. But this tends to apply in skirmish settings only, as multiplayer shooting titles take on a different sort of competitive edge, particularly when there are multiple respawns at play. The first person shooter genre has some inherent strategy imbued within, where traditional strafing, cover, and gunplay mechanics rule the day.

Void bastards gameplay