Voidling Bound review

Voidling Bound puts you in the shoes of a Space Wrangler with the ability to mentally link with special creatures. In an effort to eradicate a dark presence and make the solar system habitable for humanity, you’ll have to mate, hatch, grow, and evolve a host of creatures in a third-person action game that celebrates variety but leaves room to grow.

Humanity has pressed its way to the edge of the known galaxy. In recent years, a malevolent living pestilence has been taking control of nearby planets. Not too long ago, our scientists discovered voidlings—creatures capable of cleansing the pestilence and using their unique biological abilities to make life habitable for humans. We just need you, as a space wrangler, to mentally link with them and get the job done.

At its heart, Voidling Bound is a third-person action game with a lot of customization options and some gacha-adjacent mechanics. The campaign will have you fighting off waves of enemies and completing a handful of stages across a few planets. As you play, you’ll collect eggs to hatch, elemental resources for evolving your creatures, and research points that act as your in-game currency for everything else.

The campaign is split over a series of missions on a few planets. Missions fall into one of two categories: wave-based survival and exploration. The latter will grade you based on completion, speed of completion, and how many collectibles you nabbed along the way. Either way, you’ll have to face off with a boss to complete your objective.

Combat itself feels like a fairly standard third-person action game with a few caveats. Depending on your voidling’s skillset, you can shoot a projectile and swipe, but from there, the sky is the limit. Some can dive bomb, set up relay pylons to bounce electricity between, create poison pools, and more. You’ll want to spend time growing your team so you can find the perfect combination for your playstyle and elemental tastes.

Your character, the space wrangler, really only serves as a proxy for in-ship activities. As this figure with an obscured face, you’ll talk with NPCs, hatch eggs, upgrade skill trees, and evolve creatures. Once you’re ready to go planetside, chemicals flood your helmet, a neural link is formed, and you’ll take control of your voidling of choice for the actual mission. The ship activities, which could have easily been a menu, include everything from accepting missions to allocating skill points and evolving your voidlings. 

Discoverability is the name of the game with Voidling Bound. At launch, there are 9 different voidling species. Each has an affinity for two elements it can evolve into, with a total of 15 evolutions for each element. Doing the math, that’s a total of 30 evolutions per voidling for 270 possible evolutions to research throughout the game. It’s worth taking the time and effort to test each creature and its evolutions, too, as some play wildly differently. Whatever your speed, you’re sure to find one you click with.

On top of evolutions, each species gets its own 4-part skill tree with a few dozen nodes to research. If that weren’t enough, you can breed two creatures of the same species for stronger offspring, work them out in your on-ship gym to level them up and improve their stats further, and eventually gene splice to pull the best comprehensive skill set you can muster. Careful, though—gene splicing will render a voidling unable to reproduce.

When you finally reach the endgame, Voidling Bound essentially transforms from a level-based campaign into a roguelike. With an end-game dungeon world, you’ll drop in, facing enemies of all factions, in a bid to conquer 50 levels in a single run. You can take your earnings and leave early or risk it all to keep pushing. This final mode grants you special new items that can further power up your voidlings, too. It can be an addictive loop that’s fed by fun, varied combat.

Enemies will be one of four factions and have their own elemental weaknesses, so you’ll want to be mindful of that when choosing what creature to go into the mission with. Taking an electric creature into a mission with no weakness to electricity definitely makes for a more cumbersome experience than exploiting said weaknesses.

From a visual design perspective, I love Voidling Bound’s art style. All of the creature designs are bright and vibrant with satisfying variety. Like the voidlings, enemy variety is kept fun and interesting, too. The NPCs, though you only see them on the ship, look fantastic, with comic book features thrown into 3-D models. I’d love to see them in motion somehow outside the ship. The same goes for our own space wrangler, whom we never get to see outside the deck of the ship. Voidling Bound’s environmental design is eye-catching and entertaining to navigate, too.

As it currently sits, Voidling Bound is an engaging third-person action game that offers an experience you’ll enjoy for 10 or so hours (unless you decide to engage with the roguelike endgame mode). There is a campaign, yes, but the game is lacking in terms of actual storytelling or characters you’ll care about. I’d also love to see the possibility of multiplayer content. The devs have already released a roadmap with plans for more voidlings, levels, and content, though, so I’m excited to see where the game goes from here. At $25, there’s plenty of fun to be had, and the prospect of an engaged team set to deliver more is promising. If you like third-person action games and completionism, Voidling Bound is a title you should check out for yourself.