Void Crew Review

Void Crew is a messy, first-person mix of FTL: Faster Than Light and Sea of ​​Thieves, where you must take a team of one to four players and traverse the galaxy, trying to keep your ship intact while jumping between an increasingly hard battle space .

Or rather, the structure Is FTL. At the end of each encounter, you’ll activate the ship’s vacuum drive and jump into space, then head to a glowing 3D map to choose which of three missions you want to complete next. They are varied, and while this inevitably results in clouds of enemy ships being thrown out, there seems to be a difference between, say, ambushing a convoy and destroying a shipyard.

The end result is basically the best Firefly game ever made, in which you and as many friends as you can squeeze onto the ship wage guerrilla warfare in all directions and leap off into the void when everything starts to turn against you.

Your crew is divided into four different classes: Pilot, Engineer, Gunner and Scavenger. The roles are plain: the pilot controls the ship, the engineer repairs it, the gunners defend it, and the scavenger… gets the hook. The first three have skill trees that enhance their specific niches and even give them a buff that’s perfect for do-or-die moments of heroism, from allowing Gunners to supercharge their stations to making Engineers act faster and repair things faster.

Meanwhile, the scavenger has a loose mix of skills that can be upgraded, making them better off the ship. This is a role that is simply not needed – while hull damage requires someone to go out into the open to repair it, in this case you really want it to be an Engineer who is better at repairing it. There If certain goals that require you to go outside the ship, but generally speaking, having someone outside the ship is a negative. As a result, Scavenger offers both the most stimulating possibilities and the most disappointing experience when you jump into the game for the first time. Compared to other classes, there’s no clear fit for the Scavenger, so you feel out of place in the ecosystem that keeps your little boat safe and sound.

These roles are loose and multiple classes can be used, but because the far reaches of the skill trees for each role are so powerful, defining other classes seems incapable. As I level up, I may find that I can get every different skill in each class – I haven’t found an upper limit on how many skill points I can get yet – but since each modern skill seems like a huge step forward in terms of this, what is possible, it would be stupid to spread your points at an early stage.

There is a narrative here, but it can be ignored. The real story is the one you make up. I cannot tell you whether the faction you are allied with, METEM, is good or evil. But I can’t support but think of our Engineer, who remained preternaturally serene as he jumped around the belly of the ship, turning on the vacuum drive, putting out the flames, and repairing the shorted wires to keep us alive long enough to jump out of dodge. This isn’t the only tale of unlikely survival that Void Crew has presented to me, and honestly, several of them hinge on my friend Tim being a serene engineer while the rest of us try not to get crushed by a soulless universe.

Still, the Void Crew story engine isn’t the only hardware you’ll get your hands on. It’s a game about spaceships and tinkering with them.

The Void Crew ships look like they were made by Fisher-Price, all with gigantic buttons to open the airlock doors and massive levers to release the pressure later. With a quick press of the F key, you can interact with almost anything, and most things are self-explanatory. Constructing modern modules on your ship is a plain matter of dragging the box into an empty space and then turning the handle on the top. You deconstruct parts of your ship by pulling a gigantic lever at the base of each part. You can do this at any time, but low of turning off the shield generator mid-fight, it’s difficult to imagine why you’d want to do it anywhere other than the relaxing, safe and sound void tunnel.

The Frigate is simple to fly and maintain, but the Destroyer is huge and it seems too hard for a team of four to stay afloat. You unlock several different configurations with their own specializations, whether it’s a CQB (close quarter combat) ship that starts with two spinning miniguns, or an energy boat that offers more laser cannons (and power issues) than you’re used to able to shake a stick.

We didn’t pick a favorite, but we felt more comfortable on the smaller frigate, and as we got to know every inch of the ship, the game came to life with the team running around our colony like little ants. “I’m running out of ammo,” I shouted as I reached the last 600 rounds in my ridiculously fast-firing Gatling rifle. At that moment the Engineer ran from the engine room to the storage shelves, grabbed a box of ammunition, carried it to my place at the rear of the ship, and loaded more ammunition. On the way back he would dip into the energy room and remove the battery from the charger, charging it to our shield and allowing us to take a little more punishment. From there he would take the empty battery from the shield to recharge it, then return to his slot in the engine room, keeping the engine trimmed and the thrusters charged to keep our pilot as mobile as possible.

It’s a role he was born to play, and I think in most teams people can easily slip into that role. My love of things that explode made me a natural marksman, but I also enjoyed the twists and turns of piloting and found peace flying around the inside of a ship while fighting as an engineer.

Ultimately, though, it’s the guns that draw me in. There’s a whole range of different weapons here, from long-range snipers to Gatling guns and everything in between. Energy weapons require no ammo, but consume a lot of power, while physical weapons deal terrible damage and never overheat. Having to track down enemies and then take shots is unusual in this type of game, and it’s a lot of fun when you have to deal with it.

Overall, Void Crew seems to have a good foundation here. There are a few omissions: As a pilot, the strange thing is that you can’t control your pitch and yaw. We’ve already discussed how pointless Scavenger seems. But the only major drawback is that there isn’t enough content yet to keep you playing for long. I’ve played a frosty 20 hours, but I feel like I’ve seen it all, even if I haven’t mastered much of it. My next challenge is to defeat the bosses: giant, screen-spanning objects like a giant spike surrounded by turrets or a hollow sun full of energy that will set your ship on fire from the inside as soon as its giant energy beam touches you. After that, I’m not sure what I’ll be left to do.

Still, Void Crew offers a compelling reason to head to a galaxy far, far away – and while there are a few oddities here and there, it’s an explosion of sci-fi co-op chaos. Gather your friends, go out and create your own stories.