Among multiple major announcements during the Gamescom Opening Night Live event, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, gameplay reveal for Resident Evil Requiem, and season two of the Fallout show, there was one game that only featured a 30-second trailer, but it’s everything I ever wanted from an FPS.
VOID/BREAKER is a roguelite FPS developed by Daniel Stubbington, released in early access during Gamescom ONL on Aug. 19. It’s fueled by high-octane action and endless modification combinations for your weapons. As you’d expect from a roguelite, the game is all about making runs through randomly generated levels to defeat enemies, gather loot, then die, upgrade your gear, and try again.
Many level types will be very familiar to you if you have ever played a roguelite. There are combat encounters, shops, bosses, rooms with random events, and more. What makes the game shine bright, though, is the combat.
Fights in VOID/BREAKER are simultaneously fast-paced and strategic. Even on normal difficulty, the enemies can hit pretty hard, forcing you to speed around the arena, using dashes, double jumps, rails, and grapple points. Health and ammo are resources, and for enemies to drop either, you need to stagger them first. This is where the destructibility of this game comes into play.
Gameplay around destructibility is similar to THE FINALS. You can tether almost any small object on the map, from an office chair to an elemental barrel (those are also stored in hanging colorful crates), and throw it at the enemy to build its stagger meter. If there are no pickups, you can create some yourself by throwing a grenade at a building, blowing it to pieces, and picking up its debris.
On the topic of THE FINALS, there’s even an encounter that tasks you with delivering a box to a terminal and protecting it, similarly to how you would capture and deliver Cashboxes.
This creates a gameplay loop of dodging enemy attacks, zooming across the arena, using the environment to stun enemies, and defeating them to replenish health and ammo. Of course, if you don’t need health or ammo, you can just shoot them.
VOID/BREAKER‘s gimmick is weapon modifications. At the start of the run, you pick a weapon. As you clear areas, you’ll get modules for the gun, and that’s when the real game begins. You start with a limited mod grid in your inventory (not all slots are active), and as you play, you’ll get mods that can activate new slots, empower active ones, as well as give you and your weapon new abilities, fire modes, attacks, scopes, and more.
To give you an idea of what you can build: During one of the early runs, I got a Sparkbreaker mod that creates electric projectiles. I then combined it with Homing Bullets, which cause projectiles to home in on targets, and Skyfire, which makes projectiles rain from the sky instead of firing from the weapon. Slap on the Kinetic Strike Adapter to increase the projectile damage by 300 percent after sliding, and I am now a sliding wizard with an assault rifle that calls down deadly electric rain.
If I were to find one thing to complain about, that would be the boss fights at the end of each zone. There are three zones/biomes, and each has its own boss. The core mechanic of a boss fight is destroying pillars and throwing the debris at the boss to stagger and enable a short damage phase. Bosses and their mechanics are always the same, making what should be an epic experience more tedious for a roguelite, the more runs you play.
Then again, VOID/BREAKER is in early access and is developed by a single person. Daniel already shared a roadmap of what’s to come over the course of the next couple of quarters, including new modules, enemies, story content, and more, so if you’re an FPS fan and have nothing to play this evening, I highly recommend VOID/BREAKER.
