Mycopunk early access final preview — Pigeons at Play is cooking

I have absolutely no idea why, but it seems like mushrooms are everywhere these days. From coffee replacements like chaga tea, Atlas, Ryze, and Mud Water, to a barrage of mushroom supplements and snacks, it seems like this fungal trend is spreading like… well… mold. Heck, when I googled “reishi mushroom,” the word “tincture” was third on the autofill, so that says a lot about something. To get away from all this mushroomy madness, I sat down at my favorite local restaurant for a bite to eat, to see that they’ve replaced the burgers with meat that’s half mushroom. I’m sorry, but has The Last of Us taught us nothing? I don’t trust this in the slightest. Anyways, Mycopunk is a sci-fi PvE co-op shooter where you work for a shady corporation to act as an anti-fungal agent to purge a moon of a spreading moldy threat that’s integrated with the world’s technology. Despite being in early access, it’s feature-complete, and one of the best games I’ve played in 2025.

Hopping right into the game’s plot, players find themselves on a spaceship hovering above the moon of New Atlas, and it’s both futuristic and dingy. I’d call it utilitarian, but I’m not sure what utility the pipe spraying water all over the deck serves. That’s ok though, because you’re not just on any spaceship, you’re on a Saxon spaceship called The H.U.B. (Hub for the Undertaking of Business), put to the heavens by the galactic megacorporation that offers free* joy pills to any and all of its employees. Not sure what good a joy pill would do for ya, as you’re a robot. Well actually, four robots. You can swap between a quartet of robotic wagies before you’re jettisoned down planetside in a drop ship for your mission.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of the gameplay, let's touch on your employer, Saxon, a bit more. The developers put a lot of effort into the lore. Heck, there’s even an employee handbook on Steam that goes into the history of the Saxon corporation. Roachard, your (usually) bipedal cockroach manager who lives on The H.U.B., straight up airs the company’s dirty laundry in notes attached to the document. He also says that no one knows who owns the company now. In other media depicting corporate dystopias, characters speak of such topics in hushed tones. The flippant acknowledgement of Saxon’s wrongdoings is a new kind of corporate horror; they don’t care who knows their sins because they’re too big to fail. They’re not some incomprehensible King in Yellow style eldritch horror, they’re an apathetic giant looking down on you with greed-glazed eyes. Even if you snub their rules, they probably won’t notice, and even if they do, they’re too bound up by the endless mass of bureaucratic inefficiencies to do anything about it. They have millions of employees, and you’re four of ‘em.

Taking a look at those four bots, we’ve got Bruiser, Glider, Scrapper, and Wranger. Bruiser is a security bot with a hard-light shield to block enemies and reflect their shots, and a jump and slam ability that’s decent for both mobility and damage. He’s the supportive tank of the team with a penchant for self-sacrificial behaviors.

Next, we’ve got Glider, and as the name suggests, she has a wingsuit that lets her jet around and gain distance; height? Not so much. Originally a rescue drone, she’s been given a rocket launcher that fires missiles, which heal her allies and obliterate her enemies. She’s optimistic and lethal, an effective combination.

Moving on to our penultimate employee, there’s Scrapper. She was thrown in a dump and left alone, so she built herself back up. Along with her ingenuity comes one of the side effects of her isolation—a lack of social graces. Her kit includes a grapple pole that she and teammates can attach to and swing around, and she has a jetpack that offers good vertical mobility, which is as much of that as she’ll get at Saxon Industries.

Finally, there’s Wrangler. He was a film star who did well in cowboy roles, but now that his niche has fallen out of vogue, he’s hoping to jumpstart his dead career by helping to clean up Atlas. Wrangler has a rocket lasso for pulling himself forward or certain objects towards himself. He also comes equipped with a rocket dash, giving him a quick boost.

Finally again, there’s Rochard. He’s not actually a playable character, but he’s the only NPC, and he’s charming as heck. His constant yapping about whatever crosses his mind is endearing, and he usually has a kind word to say to the team (unless you eat his chips). What could have been a divisive Claptrap or Preston Garvey type character ended up as an eccentric and lovable manager at the corporate gas station who occasionally steals some snacks for his crew.

Now that we’ve covered the crew, let's discuss the gear you’ll be using to dispatch enemies. There are currently eight weapons in the game, and they’re grouped into pairs that you can unlock at various levels. They cover a wide variety of playstyles, from a marksman’s rifle that doubles as a laser, to a swarm launcher that fires off a cloud of little drone-like pellets, there’s probably a weapon you’ll like. You can carry two with you on your missions, with no restrictions on any pairing. If you were the type of kid who would grab two power weapons in your Halo 3 LAN matches, then you’ll be right at home. On top of guns, you have grenades, three to be exact. There are incendiary, shock, and acid grenades, and they’re pretty loyal to their archetypes. In fact, all of them are rather generic damage over time effects, until you get into the upgrades that is.

Mycopunk features an inventory-management-based upgrade system. All of the guns, grenades, and even the characters have a grid, with each upgrade being a shape that can be placed onto that grid. The trick is to fit as many shapes into as many open slots as possible. As a general rule of thumb, the more powerful the upgrade, the more cumbersome they are to fit into the grid. You might like an upgrade, but it’s not very ergonomic. While it can be challenging to pack them all together, it’s quite rewarding as well. In some nice quality of life moves, the developers added three loadout slots and a temporary storage area for when you’re shuffling your upgrades around. If you want more grid slots, playing with a weapon will level it up, giving you more wiggle room.

Upgrades range from decent boosts to insanely powerful, coming in rarities of standard, rare, epic, and exotic. For example, one of the standard upgrades, Hallucinated Space, gave me +1 to my magazine. Compare that to the Internal Combustion upgrade, which builds up “combustion” stacks when you take fire damage, culminating in a massive explosion that heals you and harms enemies. Yeah, there’s quite a gap between the top and bottom rarities, but power levels get a bit hazier in the middle tiers. Remember that marksman’s rifle that doubles as a laser that I mentioned? Well it’s called the DMLR, and one of its rare upgrades, Hard-Light Bypass, allows you to beam your laser right through enemy shields. Mind you, nothing else in the game can get past these shields until you destroy them, save for a massive, powerful explosion. That beast of an upgrade turns the DMLR into one of the most reliable guns in the game, and it’s only on the second rarity tier.

Upgrades aren’t just overpowered effects, either; a lot of them tweak a gun’s range or how it handles. I managed to turn the archetypal SMG gun into something resembling more of an LMG by boosting its magazine size, range, and damage, at the cost of firing speed and stability. Overall, don’t ignore upgrades, they fundamentally change how you use a weapon and synergize with other parts of your kit, which can be pivotal for surviving higher difficulties. Speaking of which, lets finally move moon-side and discuss the gameplay and enigmatic fungal enemies.

In the center of The H.U.B. lies an egg-shaped, peeled-flesh-colored drop ship hooked up to a giant ring via bulky, rusty-looking tubes. Naturally, being such an inviting sight, players will find their way into its gaping maw where they find a holographic globe, and next to it, a big red lever. Click on the globe to get a view of New Atlas’ four territories Gravity Farms, Titan City, Moldy Tundra, and Flourishing Desert. Each one of these areas has a handful of missions with a selectable difficulty, which reset every dozen or so minutes. Those missions include such innocent activities as cleaning a pipeline, rolling a spherical battery back to your ship, decimating the local flora, and countering another company’s corporate espionage with your own corporate planetary rail gun to atomize their ships. Just kidding, it won’t atomize the ship, and the remains will, in fact, rain down upon you while completing the mission. To be honest, dodging debris is the least of your worries, as the fungal horde will be after you the entire time.

The enemies you face are many, they are complex, and they are incredibly fun to shoot. Let me explain. These life forms are little bright-orange fungal balls, who have surrounded themselves in a metal overcoat and walk around on long purple limbs with scythe-like appendages at the end. These are the least complex variants. There are others that take the form of pyramid shaped metal chunks, large metal boxes, massive diamond shapes, and finally, abominations, which are hulking metal and mushroom goliaths. Any and all of these forms can come with shield generators, anti-gravity generators, beams that make their allies invulnerable to everything, gatling weapons, and more! The good news is, you can destroy any of these attachments by shooting them, or disable them by destroying the limb they’re attached to. Sometimes an arm with a massive sweeping laser will have a very weak joint to shoot at, thus disabling it. The bad news is that if you don’t break the weapon or attachment, another fungi creature will pick it up. This can lead to scenarios where an enemy recaptures a bunch of weapons, and becomes ten times the problem it was before.

Regardless, the way to deal with these creatures permanently is to blast through their metal exterior to expose their squishy glowing core and put a few rounds through it. Tactically focusing your fire on one side of the fungus to break off its armor and seeing that core will never not be satisfying. It seems that larger enemies try to hide their weak spots once it’s exposed, turning away from the player. This leads to a fun little dance of trying to get a good final shot in, making the player feel like a predator on the hunt. This is a very satisfying process on lower-mid difficulties, but becomes a bit bullet spongey on higher ones. On the bright side, the mushrooms aren’t too smart, and will occasionally attach healing orbs or explosives to themselves, both of which you can take advantage of. Heck, some enemies are overclocked, causing them to explode violently when they die.

Scattered around the landscape are various plants, containers, special weapons, and side objectives, many of which yield materials to unlock those upgrades back at the ship. The containers are a simple little mini game like flipping a switch from false to true, clicking buttons to turn green, or spinning lock to open it. Plants, on the other hand, serve a few functions. Some can be shot at, and explode in the same elemental types as grenades, while others need to be punched to harvest or thrown at enemies to coat them with goo, which grants you resources.

Next up are special weapons that can be called down at certain stations, and they’re as destructive as they are rare. One fires powerful lightning projectiles, another is pretty much a Fatman from Fallout with a longer charge time. When you have an abomination and two massive fungal clusters nipping at your heels, these can shift the tide of a battle. Then there are side objectives, usually tasks like staying within a circle for a time to upload data, or loading chunks of an asteroid onto a launch pad to fire up into space for Saxon to collect. Either way, it’s a bit of a handful while being pursued by your adversaries. It helps a lot to bring friends along.

That brings us to our next topic, balancing. While you can play alone, the game’s design and balance are definitely geared toward being in a group. Splitting the amount of agro between four players, as well as taking advantage of the numerous player upgrades geared around teamplay, makes missions go a lot smoother. That goes double for higher difficulties. I would often play solo, and while it was manageable, some sore spots arose. For example, trying to complete any kind of side objective alone was tedious, and at times, frustrating. There’s also no way to pause the game, and no one to cover you when you need to go AFK means assured death.

Once you’ve completed your mission, you can call down the ship you landed on to pick your squad up. The split second everyone is on board, it blasts off to the H.U.B., so make sure you’ve done everything you want to before making your departure. Back on the H.U.B., there are plenty of activities and points of interest to play around with. From hidden lore and upgrades, to scooching around on those little scooters you used to play around on and obliterate your shins with in gym class (they’re just as lethal here), there’s a lot to play around with. The ship also gives us a glimpse into Saxon’s company culture, with various motivational* posters hanging up, like one that reads “Depression breeds inefficiency.” In a nice touch, the spawn room changes depending on which character you’re playing, with Glider owning a bunch of plushies, Scrapper has a workshop, Bruiser’s is a messy rec room, and Wrangler has a green room. It really humanizes these robots beyond what their already entertaining voice lines were doing. I was continuously amazed by how fun it was to crawl around in the vents, or get lost in some niche section of the ship.

I called the design style of the H.U.B. utilitarian, and the overarching art style is a very rich, saturated, cel shaded look. Maps have a surreal, Alice in Wonderland type vibe to them, with giant mushrooms and industrial buildings dwarfing you, which are themselves dwarfed by the majesty of space in the backdrop. The U.I. is also fantastic, with its combination of clean simplicity and diegetic elements, such as physically pulling a lever or flipping a switch to command the drop ship. There are very few screens to go through between selecting a mission, going down to the world, completing the mission, and returning home. It’s all very seamless. Then there are the impactful gameplay elements of the visuals, such as the plume of damage numbers which arise when you throw a grenade into a group of enemies—think Borderlands.

Plain and simply, I’m thoroughly enjoying my time with Mycopunk and its action-packed, whimsical world. It’s a feature complete game in early access, and the developers are not only constantly working to make it better balance-wise, but they’re also adding events. At the time this preview is being written, there’s a manhunt to eliminate a massive fungal amalgamation which has a chance to appear on some levels. If you’re into hell-with-a-grin style sci-fi settings, then check this game out on Steam!