Mycopunk Preview – A co-op shooter for all you fun guys out there

There’s a massive fungaloid infection spreading across a remote moon, and so Saxon is sending their very best crew of exterminators to deal with it. Well… their most willing and cheapest, at least. You’re not the first crew that Roachard has sent down to the surface, and it’s probably best not to ask why…

So what kind of game is this? Well, it’s a co-op mission-based shooter. There’s shades of Helldivers 2 to one of the missions in the demo, as you are tasked with dropping down a railgun, setting it up, aiming and then blasting a rival space station out of the sky, with a gloriously huge explosion as your main reward, but that’s maybe more of a thematic overlay. The better comparison, though, would be Deep Rock Galactic for the game’s overarching structure.

You can see that most clearly between missions, where you head to Saxon’s orbital dropship and find a little playground to mess around in while you wait for everyone to lobby up or get their gear sorted. There’s a drop pod right in the middle where you pick your mission and head down to the planet surface, but surrounding it in the main hall is a bunch of elevators up to the rafters, a weird live action TV screen, a tesla pole, a blurred out section (which is amusingly strange), and more. But there’s also a bunch of locked doors and rooms that you want to find secret passages to get around to open up a rail-filled firing range, or gain access to race cars which, if you want, you can actually take down on missions with you by just driving it into the dropship!

There’s a scrappy, grungey style to Mycopunk that I love, its visual style reminiscent of games like Sable, Void Bastards and other cel-shaded games of the last half decade, though with the true roots coming from classic graphic novels and comic artistry of Moebius. It’s all about the thin black lines around objects and differently coloured details, adding a noisiness to simple geometry as you get further away from it.

But then there’s the world and the bizarre aliens that you’re battling once you drop down to the surface. Spawning in from gently waving flame tendrils, they’re all about sinew and slimy limbs sprouting from a central point, often holding up weapons and shields to shoot back at you. For smaller enemies, you can just blast away at their core to defeat them, but their limbs are detachable, which comes in mighty useful when fighting the larger many-limbed Abominations, where you can whittle down the number of sniper rifles, shield domes, smashing arms and everything else that they have before attacking their heart. Just beware that smaller enemies can actually pick these weapons back up and start using them, while the Abominations can sprout new arms if you don’t finish them off.

Combat can become pretty frantic because of this, especially as many enemies will tower over you, though in the demo’s missions it rarely felt like we were truly at risk. OK, so Dom did die once or twice, and when that happens your character is split in half, needing teammates to grab the top or bottom and reunite it to revive you.

There’s four characters to choose from, each with a different movement ability and special skill. Wrangler has a rocket lasso that you can use to drag enemies to you or you to fixed objects, and an air dash, Bruiser has a bullet reflecting shield and slam attack, Scrapper can great a grapple pull for all the team to use and a jet pack, and Glider has rockets that heal allies and a wing suit that lets them fly. The Glider has a clear advantage when getting around, letting them race ahead to objectives, but I’m kind of OK with that not being particularly balanced. Just make sure that you play with people that aren’t going to just abandon you, I guess?

The weapons can put their own twist on things as well. Sure, there’s a standard-ish assault rifle, there’s a shotgun with fire damage, there’s a gun that looks an awful lot like one of Halo’s Covenant sniper rifles, but then there’s the Swarm Launcher. This fires out bullets that then hang in the air until you let go of the trigger and then all drop at once. It’s just such an intriguing weapon that feels immediately satisfying to use.

You can quickly race through the ammo it gives you for your weapon, but thankfully you always have two guns and can just switch to the other. Dealing damage with one weapon restocks the ammo of the other, so you won’t be away from your favourite or better gun for too long.

Mycopunk also dips a toe into that pool of looter shooter upgrades, though with an intriguing twist of its own. Sure, you’re grabbing upgrades that are dropped in missions and earning them from successful completions, and then spending currency to unlock them, but the magic comes from how you slot these together. There’s a 7×7 hexagonal grid where you slot these upgrades together, but they’re not taking up a single slot and instead look more like diagrams of chemical compounds. Standard upgrades will just be a few hexes joined up, while Epic and Exotic upgrades will branch out and sprawl, forcing you to figure out how best to slot multiple upgrades together.

These upgrades also try to stay away from being basic percentage power boosts, in favour modifying how weapons behave. OK, so that might be that a burn effect is beefed up, but it can also be that the Swarm Launcher’s bullets now automatically home to enemies or follow your crosshair, or that you have infinite ammo at the cost of shooting too long hurting you.

From its two mission demo, Mycopunk gives a good first impression. It’s light, it’s fast, it’s a little bit scrappy, and there’s that great art style. As it looks first to a Steam Early Access release, there’s definitely room to grow, and to reveal more of what’s planned. There’s multiple regions down on the planet, there’s more mission types to come, more modifiers, more of a narrative to wrap around things. If you’re looking for a new co-op blaster, this is one to keep an eye on.