Mycopunk Preview

Speed, violence and attempts at comedy. That is how I would describe my initial playthrough of Mycopunk, the new title coming from developer Pigeons at Play. Now, I’ve played my fair share of mission shooters, including MycopunkDeep Rock Galactic with my fellow GameGrinners Hemogoblin and Martin Heath. 

Mycopunk has you take the role of one of four classes, each with their own personalities, abilities, and weapons; for the most part, they all have a clear purpose. For instance, the bruiser has a shield that lets it redirect attacks, while the glider can launch waves of missiles. Now, in the interest of fairness, I will admit that I couldn’t find anyone to party up with when I played. Thankfully, it is entirely possible to play Mycopunk solo (so long as you don’t go near the higher difficulties). 

I chose to play as the Wrangler, primarily due to him having a lasso, which gave me a shotgun and a machine gun. From there, it was up to me to move around the main ship, which functions as a kind of hub. There’s not much to do here on the ship initially, but it appears that there’s more you can unlock as you explore. In truth, it mostly serves as the area where you can pick missions and launch your pod.

Before I get into that, I do want to mention the comedy of the game which is… a bit hit or miss. The first thing to note is that most of the NPCs are giant cowboy cockroaches. This strangeness spreads to the rest of the ship: for instance, I saw a television playing, what appeared to be, a murder mystery with people in roach costumes. Mycopunk can be funny, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s more due to how weird it is, and I certainly wouldn’t consider it a reason to buy the game.

On the plus side, I saw a fair amount of variety in missions and locations to play in. You’re offered several different areas, each of which offers you three different missions that you can choose from. Unlike HELLDIVERS 2, there’s no reason to play all three in one area, so you can mix and match a fair amount. This allows the game to make the most of the different locations on offer, and some are a blast to play in, such as Titan City. Others are a bit more basic, but each has its charm.

The actual enemies you fight are pretty weird, they’re like an unholy combination of weapons, tentacles, and other bits of hardware. Initially, I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with them, but once I played more matches, I quickly changed my mind about that. While the smaller enemies are more annoying, you end up having to fight some pretty horrific combinations that wave all manner of random guns at you. 

They’re also not that easy to take down, with even the smaller enemies taking a fair few shots to kill. However, Mycopunk does one really interesting thing when it comes to weapons, primarily when it comes to how you gather ammo. You only have access to two guns when you’re on a mission, but when you use one, it adds ammo to the other. The game forces you to use both guns and honestly, I like this mechanic quite a lot. On top of that, the actual gameplay is pretty fast-paced, and each of the mission types plays differently enough that you never feel like you're just moving from switch to switch. For instance, one has you building power lines that you can ride on, while another has you aiming a railgun. 

It isn’t all perfect, however, and there are some odd problems with the game that need addressing. For instance, it’s terrible at explaining how to do certain things: I only realised there was a slide move when a special move I unlocked told me about it. 

On that note, while I can appreciate that you must place upgrades you unlock similarly to Leon’s briefcase in profile game="2257" title="Resident Evil 4"], having to use materials to unlock weapon upgrades, both of which you have to find on the map, can get pretty annoying. 

My final issue is that, while the game does a great job of making the enemies varied, they still become hard to tell apart when they’re in a big group. Also, for some reason, their ranged attacks just go through buildings and other parts of the level, which got annoying really fast when I was trying to take a moment to let my health regenerate. 

However, I had a lot of fun playing through Mycopunk, although I suspect the game would be much improved with a full team. With that said, while I don’t think it will manage to unseat some of the greats in the genre.