Mycopunk review

It was meant to be a simple mission. My line manager at the humble mega-mining corporation Saxon—the cockroach known as Roachard Cox—laid it all out: break into a compound, tear through the fungus and goop to free the core from its prison, transport it back to the drop pod, and then escape with ample time to spare. Unfortunately, few things in life are simple.

See Mycopunk is about as chaotic as a co-op shooter can get. You work for a megacorporation that wants to mine the planet of New Atlas for Saxonite, but after a fungus infects the world, you're sent down alongside other members of the New Atlas Hazard Crew to clear the way and gather various helpful resources. For example, The Gravity Farms hold Romphus, a fungus that grows on enemy shells, and Gussula, both assets I was carrying this mission out for.

I got through the first leg of the mission without any issues. Well, to be more specific, I left all my issues behind as I skedaddled away from hordes of fungal-infected enemies with the help of my trusty grapple pole, launching me into the stratosphere.

My objective? A large energy core tucked away in a warehouse—quite far away, situated on the other side of a sparse forest. Luckily, there was a laser gun waiting for me outside, which I could use to blow the hinges off the door and get inside.

The only problem was that, by the time I started work on destroying the hinges, my original issues all caught up with me. I was quickly swarmed by mountains of mycological robots. My mother's words, "Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today", echoed in my skull as it was bashed in by a bot with a comically large claw.

Luckily, I was able to kite my problems instead of dealing with them, slowly picking them off while creating enough distance to fulfil my contractual obligations.

I finally managed to blow the hinges off the door, get inside the compound and locate the core. It was wrapped in the same fungus that had infected the planet of New Atlas. I shot all the gunk off, then started rolling the core out the door and back to the drop pod, channelling my inner dung beetle.

Just as I was about to kick the core into the ship, an Abomination Sniper spawned on top of me and ate it. Typical. Abominations are huge robots, armed with an array of weaponry like laser beams, sniper rifles, and even immortality shields, which you have to destroy first before you can deal with them.

Killing one of these beasts isn't easy, which is why I usually live and let live when I encounter one. But this fiend is at my core, and I can't leave without it, so oil must be shed.

One game of 'ring around the drop pod' later, I was able to pry open the metallic jaws of the Abomination, drag the core out of its gut, and haul it back into the ship. It was hard, pure chaos and work, but hey, that's just your average day working for Saxon at the New Atlas Hazard Crew.

Run for the hills

Mycopunk is full of clutch plays, chaotic fights, and good old-fashioned train-ing enemies. It's probably the most fun I've had in a shooter for a long time, primarily because it manages to straddle the line of being difficult but not punishing.

When selecting one of the various mission types, you can also customise the difficulty. There are three swarm intensities to choose from, which'll alter how likely enemies are to overrun you. Then there are six different difficulty levels to pick from, Difficulty 1 is the easiest, providing the least amount of resources, and Difficulty 6 is the hardest, giving players the most resources and XP.

Being able to change swarm intensities and difficulty separately from each other lets you experience all the different missions at your own pace, in circumstances that let you enjoy Mycopunk to the fullest. Like having to deal with mountains of enemies piling onto you at every second, but don't want them to pack too much of a punch? Pick a high swarm intensity at a low level, and so on.

Outside of difficulty, smart design choices (like removing the need to hunt for ammo or getting rid of the dreaded stamina bar) also make a world of difference. Instead of worrying about where I could find the next ammo cache like in other games, all I need to do to get more bullets is damage enemies with my other weapon.

This lets you focus on pulling off sick trickshots or clutch plays, rather than chaining you to a reload animation. It's also a great way to encourage players to diversify and upgrade all their weapons, not just focus on one favourite, which is something I'm guilty of in my FPS games.

I'm a huge fan of there being no stamina system, too. The enemy bots are also pretty fast, so having the ability to keep on running is vital. But it's not like you zip around whenever you feel like it. Instead, three of the four characters all have movement-based abilities which are on cooldown.

Scrapper (my fav) has a jetpack and deploys a grapple pole, which the whole team can use to launch themselves in the air. Wrangler has an air dash and a rocket lasso that can propel you forward. Glider has a wingsuit that you can fly around with. Bruiser just deploys shields and can ground slam, which emits a shockwave to damage nearby enemies, so I'm sure he appreciates the infinite stamina more than anyone else.

These small tweaks remove stressors that some games tend to rely on—lesser games might hold sacred the myth that a shooter has to be gruelling or realistic. Meanwhile, in Mycopunk, I'm a robot in a puffer jacket, being advised by a talking cockroach—realism went out the window a long time ago.

Putting the 'fun' in fungus

Mycopunk is launching into early access, but even so, there's loads to do. There are four different main locations on New Atlas, each dishing out a unique combo of fungus resources, which you can use to upgrade your weapons.

There are also different kinds of missions for you to explore. Cleanup Detail and Regulated Rampage are similar, in that you just need to kill a bunch of fungus-infected robots or just clean the infection out by shooting at pustules. Saxonite Transport and Prized Possession are both payload escorts, with different kinds of obstacles in the way.

Finally, Planetary Defense sees you power up and fire a planetary railgun to take out a rival company's spy ship. This is by far the coolest mission, and something I've had a ton of fun completing with friends—there's something particularly funny about one of your teammates getting crushed by falling debris, all because you forget to warn them that you're ready to use the railgun.

But the fun doesn't stop when the mission does. The home base is huge, there are minigames, car racing, and loads of pictures of what I can only assume are the developers' pets as screensavers all over the place, which is excellent.

This is when you also upgrade your characters and kit. Instead of simply unlocking upgrades from spending resources you gathered, there's also a hive-shaped inventory which you can sort upgrades into. All the upgrades come in different shapes and sizes, resembling a molecular string. You can have as many upgrades as will fit, so you have to sort them well—I even unlocked a rare upgrade for matching a 'hidden path'.

Mycopunk shows a ton of promise, but that doesn't mean it's infallible. The progression can become a bit of a slog, and it can take a while to level up or collect enough resources to upgrade your kit. There's also definitely a cap as to how many missions you can do in a row before it all just blends into a violent blur. The variety in mission types only keeps things fresh for so long.

There are also some glitches, many of which the devs are aware of, but that doesn't make them any less annoying. I've been lasered by an Abomination through a wall more than once now—you're never safe, even when you think you are. But none of this ruins the fun, it's just something to bear in mind: The fungal growths of Early Access.