Mycopunk review

Sometimes you just want to jump into a game with friends and shoot a bunch of stuff. You aren’t looking for some big, sweeping narrative with emotional highs and lows. You don’t need a dark, brooding villain or malevolent force driven by hatred or revenge. Sometimes, you just need shiny stuff, mindless fun, numbers that go up, and friends.

At first glance, I was turned off by Mycopunk’s aesthetic. I would describe it as Risk of Rain meets A Scanner Darkly. It has a grungy, cel-shaded vibe that initially rubbed me the wrong way. After allowing myself to spend some time in the game, though, I’ve grown fond of the game’s vibe, right down to its crass, witty humor. Where else could a team of robots helldive onto a planet to combat semi-sentient mushrooms with intel from a cowboy cockroach named Roachard?

The game’s concept is absurdist in the best way. Your team is essentially the corporate, robotic equivalent of the Suicide Squad, and you’re tasked with cleaning up and driving back a planetary fungal infestation. This isn’t just a grove of portobellos or chanterelles, though. What you’re dealing with is aggressive, cunning, and resourceful.

At first glance, most of your enemies look like cobbled-together walking appliances, and that’s essentially what they are, but the appliance is an armored shell for a mycelial brain. Your goal is to crack the shells and destroy the brains inside each enemy. If you don’t take out the fungus among us, it’ll continue to attack, absorbing armor and weaponry from the surrounding environment. 

When the game is sending dozens of enemies at you simultaneously, this makes for a violent, chaotic time ripe for fun. You’ll have to maneuver the environment, blasting these enemies, knocking off their limbs and armor while scrambling just to survive. Watching foes crumple as their legs are blown off or their arms come crashing down provides a real sense of satisfaction. Surviving the little guys to complete objectives and take out boss monsters will reward you with experience, cosmetics, and a host of personal and gear-focused upgrades.

Each of Mycopunk’s five characters (one of which has to be unlocked via a mission objective) has their own mobility skill, utility skill, and overarching skill tree. The Wrangler can air-dash and use a lasso, while the Bruiser can double-jump to ground slam and generate a shield wall, for example. Each character can augment their abilities with the skill tree upgrades, too. Beyond their core abilities, each robot has a grenade that can run the gamut of elemental effects (corrosion, fire, etc). Skills and grenades are on cooldowns, encouraging you to use them liberally but intelligently in tense situations.

The core of your time with Mycopunk lies in its weaponry. The game has thirteen different firearms (a baker’s dozen!)  that range from classic (like the shotgun and SMG) to zany (a plate launcher that fires a slab of metal you have to then recall). Each has its own playstyle and augmentation systems. As you play, the weapons will level up and grant their own rewards. No matter your style, you’ll find something to suit you (though some don’t become accessible until you’ve poured a bit more time into the game).

I want to take some time to focus on Mycopunk’s augmentation system, as I think it’s a fun, intelligent way to provide some variety and customization to your kit. As you complete missions or hit milestones, you’ll unlock different augmentations, each of which has its own effects and, more to the point, Tetris-like hex-puzzle shape. Your guns, grenades, and characters each have a full-blown hex-based grid for you to slot upgrades into. As you can imagine, rarer upgrades come with more unique, difficult-to-slot shapes that require some thought and sacrifice to use. Mycopunk intelligently grants you some reprieve here, though. As you level up, you’ll get the ability to rotate rarer modifications to maximize your efforts. You can also be rewarded with new augments for matching hidden upgrade paths, so covering as much of your board as possible benefits you on multiple fronts. It’s mentally satisfying, offers tangible combat adjustments, and is a fun way to spend downtime when you aren’t shooting mushrooms.

I was a bit reductive with my earlier statement that you’re just mindlessly shooting stuff with friends. That is a lot of it, but Mycopunk actually has quite a few mission types you can jump into and enjoy. You can do everything from wave-based enemy clear and roguelike modes to assembling, targeting, and launching a railgun at a spaceship. As you level up, you’ll get access to more options, and they manage to inject a fair bit of variety into what could’ve been a singularly mindless experience. If you want to drop in, do the core objectives, and get out, you can absolutely do that, but Mycopunk gives players several extra points of interest to complete objectives and earn some extra upgrades. There are even some really cool hidden events in the game you’ll want to spend some time searching for. My buddy and I stumbled across a bunker that led to a big jumping puzzle, and ultimately a seriously fun boss fight that gave us a ton of loot, too, and it was all stuff we accidentally found. I love it when games do that.

I’ve had a great time playing Mycopunk with a friend. Of course, it’s helpful to have extra firepower as you’re melting down hordes of microwaves and washing machines, but the systems they put in place to make this a fun social experience are worthy of note. If you die, your body breaks in two and gets spread across the battlefield. Your friends will have to pick up one part of you and take it to the other to revive you, putting them through a tense, dangerous situation. When your enemies are defeated, and you have downtime, though, you can just sit around and dance, flip one another off, or mindlessly pass the time. Even more, the game offers multiple avenues to acquire dumb cosmetics, so if you want to don your skeleton costume and wear a cauldron on your head, you absolutely should.

If you’re coming to Mycopunk hoping for a Gears of War story-driven experience, you’ll be sorely disappointed. If you just want to enjoy shooting a bunch of stuff and getting stronger as you pass the time with your buddies, Mycopunk is an excellent option that’s an easy recommendation. The comedy and aesthetic may not be everyone’s vibe, but there’s a load of fun to be had fighting back the fungal infestation. If your crew is looking for a goofy good time, give Mycopunk a look.