Palworld didn’t end up being the “Pokémon with guns” experience I was hoping for. I wasn’t lied to in the marketing or misled by any of the trailers; I just wanted something different from the survival-crafting-focused spin on Pokémon that Pocketpair ultimately delivered—and that’s nobody’s fault but my own.
However, it did leave me with an unfulfilled feeling—a void, if you will. I knew I wanted something like Palworld, I just had no idea what that something was. Turns out I didn’t want Pokémon with guns; I wanted Pokémon that are guns, because Voidling Bound has successfully scratched the itch that Palworld left behind.
The funny thing is, beyond sharing some creature-collecting elements, the two games couldn’t be more different, as Voidling Bound isn’t really anything like Pokémon. In fact, it’s more akin to Spore with guns, with a little bit of Sonic Adventure’s Chao Garden minigame peppered in for good measure.
But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself here, so first up, what is Voidling Bound? It’s a third-person shooter and creature collector that was released on Steam earlier this month, on June 9. It was developed and published by Hatchery Games, a small 9-person team from Quebec that’s mostly made up of former Skylanders devs from Vicarious Visions and Toys for Bob.
However, calling Voidling Bound a “creature collector” is simultaneously both overselling and underselling what’s on offer here, as there’s only actually nine “Voidlings” to collect. That’s where the Spore influences come into play, though, as those nine Voidlings all have dozens of different mutations, abilities, perks, and customizable looks, which can be mixed and matched through breeding and evolution trees.
This is also where the Palworld comparisons truly end, as the twist to Voidling Bound is that you don’t throw your little animal buddies into combat and give them orders; instead, you directly control the Voidlings in combat. This was the part of Voidling Bound that impressed me the most, as while nine creatures doesn’t sound like a lot, every single Voidling in the game feels wholly unique to play, and the combat itself feels punchy and satisfying. I won’t name names, but the shooting feels gratifying in a way that some more recent, higher-budget AAA third-person shooters haven’t.
There’s also something to be said for how straightforward Voidling Bound feels to play. I’m a bit of a tutorial- and prompt-skipper at times, yet at no point did I feel like I didn’t know what I was doing. Moving through quest objectives in levels and figuring out how to breed my Voidlings to create the ultimate overpowered chicken-shaped minigun was easy-breezy in a nice, take-your-brain-out kind of way. That isn’t to say that Voidling Bound’s combat is unchallenging, though, as I did get my ass handed to me pretty frequently on the highest difficulty.
It’s not all great, however. There are four different planets to contend with, each with a handful of main missions and a few side missions, and I did manage to finish them all in about 20-ish hours. There is a rogue-lite style endgame mode called Abyss that you can mess around with afterwards, but it was a bit too feature-light to hold my attention. It’s a shame, really, because I’m not quite done messing around with splicing all my Voidlings together, but there’s really not much of a reason to do so now that I’ve worked through all the missions.
That being said, 20-ish hours of satisfying, consistently fun gameplay for just over $20 is pretty good in my book. I hope that Hatchery Games continues to expand on the game in the coming months, because if it added just a little bit of extra sauce to Abyss mode, I’d gladly sink some more time into Voidling Bound at some point in the near future. Ultimately, though, I’m just glad there are dev teams out there who are getting weirder with the creature collector genre, because it’s a mechanic that’s begging for further experimentation.
