If you’re in the mood for a bit of mayhem, Devolver Digital would like a word. The publisher’s just unveiled Mycopunk, a new limb-slicing, robo-leaping mission-based co-op FPS that’s coming to Steam from developer Pigeons at Play later this year.
Mycopunk’s very silly action whisks players to a far-flung sci-fi future, where, as employees of space travel company Saxon, they’re ordered to go investigate a distant moon and find out why communication has been lost. It’s probably not much of a spoiler, given the title, to reveal the answer to that “why” is a fungal catastrophe, and it’s up to players – as a rag tag team of extermination robots – to clean it all up.
What you have, then, is a mission-based co-op FPS inspired by the likes of Risk of Rain, with a focus on movement, weird guns, and an outlandish upgrade system that – as Pigeons at Play explained during a recent press showing – is designed to create cool builds that break the game “in a good way”. To that end, Mycopunk features four distinct characters, all pretty agile, that offer synergies when used together, but are all powerful enough that they’ll work solo. And with no character limits, all four players can use the same character if they desire.
There’s the Wrangler – the most agile of the bunch – that has an air dash and a rocket lasso they can use to yank themselves in different directions, even grab parts or other players. The Bruiser, meanwhile, is more about up close and personal combat; they come armed with a shotgun and projector shield that can push enemies back, deflect bullets, even be slammed into the ground, causing everyone – including allies – to launch violently into the air.
The Scrapper, meanwhile, is the most team-orientated character, capable of deploying a pole all players can grapple onto from a distance, while the Glider has a flying wing suit and a rocket salvo that can be used to terrorise enemies or heal friends.
This motley crew of amenable scrap starts each mission on the deck of their rickety space ship orbiting the moon, which serves as Mycopunk’s hub and a focus of plenty of between-mission silliness. You can visit your boss, for instance – a giant cockroach who’ll provide assistance during missions – rail grind in the Recreation Sphere, or just smack each other around trying out different builds in the hangar. You can even summon vehicles – ranging from individual race cars to four-person rides – and take them on missions. Pigeons at Play is even looking to install working arcade cabinets on the ship, but that might not make it in for launch.
As for the mission themselves, they’re accessed seamlessly from the ship’s drop pod, taking players down to the moon’s surface and one of several different biomes. As you might expect, missions come in a variety of flavours, such as planetary defense missions where players are required to power up a large gun then use it to take down the ship of a rival company – and additional layers of variety are introduced through random and even weekly modifiers.
The common theme, though, is one of chaotic combat and carnage as players traverse the large open biomes and face off against swarms of alien creatures and mini-bosses. Mycopunk’s twist is that enemies are made up different pieces you can chop of individually – something you’ll need to do in order to reach the vulnerable core at their centre. However, dismembered limbs can also be a liability, given other enemies can pick up and use them for themselves. And if that wasn’t chaotic enough already, there’s also talk of other hazards players will need to contend with, including rare weather events, such as sulphur rain that can turn the ground into goo.
But if you manage to survive the chaos, finish off enemies, and complete missions, you’ll aquire fistfuls of upgrades to install back on the ship. There are upgrades for guns, grenades, even individual characters’ abilities, meaning there’s a lot of build flexibility. The wrinkle, though, is that upgrades must be installed Tetris-style in a grid of limited size, with the ability to rotate upgrades only becoming available later on.
Upgrades span four different tiers – standard, rare, epic, and exotic tiers – and provide a wide range of effets. They can increase grenade charging speeds, for instance, turn grenades into cluster bombs, imbue weapons with infinite ammo that’ll start burning you if you hold fire down too long; you’ll find upgrades that let you shoot double the bullets, or charge up ammo then fire it all out at once, and on it goes. And given 40 upgrades can be installed for every weapon, build tinkers should have a whale of a time.
And big plans are afoot for Mycopunk post-launch, with Pigeons at Play already thinking about new narrative content, new weapons, new enemies and enemy parts, and new upgrades – with the studio saying it wants to build the latter based on player’s desires. Devolver hasn’t yet revealed when Mycopunk will launch, beyond a vague “2025”, but if you’re suitably intrigued, a Mycopunk demo is coming to Steam soon.