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 with some element of movement, that can synergise when used together, but are all powerful enough that they’ll work solo. And with no character limits, all four players can utilise the same character if they so 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, and will take players down onto the moon’s surface, to one of four different biomes. As you might expect, missions come in a variety of different 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 one of chaotic combat and utter carnage as players traverse the large open biomes and face off against swarms of alien creatures and mini-bosses. The Mycopunk twist is 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 be a liability given other enemies can pick up and use them for them themselves. And if that wasn’t enough to be getting on with, there’s also talk of rare weather events, such as sulphur rain that’s able to turn the ground into goo.
By finishing off enemies and completing missions, players can acquire 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 them only becoming available later on.
You’ll find upgrades – spanning standard, rare, epic, and exotic tiers – that increase grenade charging speeds, that turn them into cluster bombs, that 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 and 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 narrative content, new weapons, new enemies and enemy parts, and new upgrades – the studio says it’ll be building the latter based on what players want to see. Publisher Devolver hasn’t yet revealed when launch will be beyond a vague “2025”, but if you’re suitably intrigued, a Mycopunk demo is available on Steam from today.
