Mycopunk
Review
A chaotic first impression turns into a carefully considered co-op shooter.
by Jordan Helsley
reviewed on PC
Putting The Fun in Fungus
Mycopunk is not quite as over-the-top verbose as its premise and visuals suggest. While each of the four robot classes, and their cockroach manager Roachard, have their own personalities, they aren’t beating you over the head with jokes or quips (even if it does sound a bit like Roachard is going to yell at you to “Catch A Ride!”). The humor comes instead from subtler touches to the lovingly crafted world and the absurd situations that you end up in with your friends.
The fact that Mycopunk finds as much humor as it does, not just without trying too hard, but almost without trying at all, is a joy. The mechanics themselves got a steady stream of guffaws out of me, but smaller touches at the home base and in the drop pod got welcoming chuckles as well. TV screens display desktops that resemble 90s-era Macintosh computers with quirky backgrounds, the fact that the gigantic door that gets welded on to the drop pod every run has a number that counts how many missions you've completed, and the way that same door just ejects onto the planet like a physics-based pinball all add to the overall charm. There's a world where the knob gets turned too high and Mycopunk becomes grating, but it seems safely positioned as is.
The Fungus Amongst Us
A little bit of brevity is welcome, because these fungal hordes can be tough to deal with. They operate by inhabiting and controlling machines and weapons from the planet, so they often come at you with a dozen legs swinging sharp pieces of metal or shooting lasers. It takes a bit of getting used to. While they do have weak points, usually covered by some metal protection, if you play it like a standard shooter you're more likely to end up severing "limbs" that continue to thirst for your robot blood than making any actual progress. It's a welcome, subtle shake-up to a shooter formula that is well-worn, and makes the act of getting lost in the on-screen fungal viscera, explosions, and general chaos much more threatening.
This is how the game truly ups the difficulty. Diligence is required to maintain a safe mission, as these pieces of fungus can commandeer the deadly weapon previously attached to the big bad you just spent a chunk of time wiping out. Not only do you get swarmed, even the lowliest enemies can become a threat under the right circumstances.
The Sights and Sounds of New Atlas
At first, Mycopunk looks like colourful vomit. Screenshots or videos present a mostly incomprehensible cluster of deadly crayons and bright lights. But after a mission or two the visual design of the world starts to click, and it's quite considered. The colours are so vibrant that they stand out among each other, and they're distinct enough to give you a bevy of information at a glance. Because these environments are littered with fungal masses, plants (both that can be used as weapons and simple set dressing) and other things like pickups, it's important that the green of a poison plant is different than that of a health pickup, and that it stands out without thinking about it. Likewise, the orange of the fungi weak point is identifiable against the explosive grafts that some of them have and the orange valuable resource you'll run into.
Now, fungi don't tend to make a ton of noise. Usually their presence is signalled by rapid synth instrumentation that fits the action perfectly, punctuated by the sounds of both friendly and enemy sci-fi firearms. It's not as busy or as chaotic as the visual element, but it is also less critical by design. You're not meant to identify enemies based on the sounds that they make, but somehow the subtle sound of the spider-like grunts walking on their blades ended up unnerving me more than a giant Abomination's seven-laser attacks nonetheless.
Going Back For More
You know the deal: the resources you collect in missions are used to upgrade your characters and weapons. Upgrades generally come in the form of random drops, which are a bit too random and scattershot for my liking, but utilizing those upgrades ends up being a game of tradeoffs and planning. Rather than having some sort of limiting number to cap off the number of upgrades you can implement, you're given a honeycomb grid, and each upgrade gets slotted in in the form of its own molecule-looking structure of nodes and paths. These can't be rotated or overlapped, so when the pieces you want fit together perfectly it feels like its own victory. And in a delightful twist you can unlock additional upgrades by discovering "hidden patterns" when slotting stuff together. It shows early on that maximizing builds, with upgrade load outs for characters and weapons, as well as standard skill tree management, will be critical to conquering the highest difficulties of Mycopunk.
The ability to discover some sort of drops in the game's missions helps maintain a willingness to drop back in for more. Collecting a half-dozen resources for upgrades is one thing, but that mostly happens absent-mindedly unless you're a handful short for a desirable upgrade. The handful of biomes feel fresh enough, and the mission variety keeps things interesting, but having that tiny bit of extra incentive really does help it stand out from the competition.
The loop is satisfying, which helps a bit with the randomization, and some upgrades can be used across characters, but there are a few "must have" skill types so it can be frustrating when the dice roll a different direction. The nature of the enemies on New Atlas greatly incentivizes movement speed. Getting out of a swarm of deadly tendrils is important to the staying alive portion of any mission. And while each character comes with a baked-in movement ability of some sort, some are unquestionably more useful than others due to their utility and speed, making the prospect of levelling up a second or third character a bit more daunting than it should be. Luckily, you can four-stack the same character if you want, so it's not necessarily a punishment for finding the character you like and sticking with it.
Not So Serious
Mycopunk might be a difficult game, though there's a wide palette for customization of even the difficulty, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, allowing players to have a good time in the chaos. When a member of your team goes down, they explode into two parts, legs and torso. Instead of a standard revive mechanic, you bring the two pieces together and your friend reforms immediately. The mad dash of two friendlies carrying body parts to a common location, or throwing one part across the map towards the other, is a fun way to add some stakes to the act of picking up a downed teammate. Tangentially, Mycopunk also comes with the best emotes in the business. Each character comes with their own (and original, it appears) dance that you can perform while waiting for the drop pod or what have you, but you can also layer in other actions, like slowly cranking up a middle finger or adding some claps to go along with your thrusts.
They're admittedly little touches, but I appreciate a game that knows that a group of friends isn't always going to role-play the characters in the game, but are instead going to dance over one of their severed legs or throw their head directly at an Amalgamation so they can get a good look at it before they come back to life. The hub space between missions has a few opportunities for safe shenanigans as well. What's bigger is that the game has foregone scrabbling for ammo pickups entirely, instead tying ammo for the first gun to damage of the second gun, and vice versa. When one runs dry, the other will have it refilled in no time, as long as you're landing shots, kills aren't even required.
The Long Road To Extermination
A blessing or a curse, the progression of Mycopunk seems specifically tuned to prolong the lifespan of its current content offering. It's less that the content is slight, and more that levelling up and upgrading take slightly longer than it feels like they should. Likewise with unlocking new weapons. I made the mistake of picking the wrong end of the first 50/50 unlock choice, and ended up with a gun I had no interest in using for far too long.
Whether Mycopunk can keep its good favour for the true endgame remains to be seen, but getting there is a fun, though slightly arduous, ride. The small, often humorous touches to the mechanics of an established first person shooter genre are definitely welcome, and I'm sure many will be delighted to hear that I wasn't asked for real-world currency once. It's hard to consider anything a sure-fire hit with so many already-established contemporaries, but Mycopunk has as good a shot as any.
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8.0
fun score
Pros
Fun gameplay loop with unique and engaging mechanics and a stellar style.
Cons
The overall presentation acts as a barrier for new players to get their feet under them and the current experience curve makes for an unnecessarily grindy experience.
