Void Crew Impressions: Our next sci-fi co-op obsession

"It's always better to play together than it is to play alone." You can read this in many reviews over the years. I think I've even used that expression myself, even if I don't agree with it. However, it can save games that aren't so great when played alone, but shine a little brighter when played with friends. Then there are games that are designed to be played together, and these have cooperation as their focal point. Void Crew is one such game, and it comes from a Danish developer known as Hutlihut Games. Now that Void Crew has debuted in Early Access on Steam, we've been playing and have plenty of thoughts.

Void Crew is a sci-fi co-op game in the vein of Left 4 Dead or Deep Rock Galactic, so you can't play it alone. Well, you can, but it doesn't go so well. I tried. You have to cooperate on the tasks that the game sets you. You can choose between two ship types, which are designed for either four players or two/three. However, I find it hard to see how you can play it as a two-person game, as there are too many functions on the ship that need to be activated by the players. There's one to control the ship you're flying and one to make sure the ship's engine are running smoothly. In addition, there will also be control of the ship's guns, which play a very important role in the missions you are sent on. So I have a hard time seeing how to play Void Crew with less than three people. That's why I got three other guys together so we could give Void Crew a proper go.

You start with a short tutorial where you try out the most basic things you need to do in the game. It's something about getting power to the ship, something about steering the ship, and then a little trip outside the ship to repair it. Once you've spent half an hour doing that, you can gather with your fellow players at the space station, which is your headquarters, and here you can choose missions and upgrade your character. The look of the station is very stylistic, with golden and very distinct colours. The whole thing has a dreamlike appearance, and the closest comparison I can come up with is the Tron films, with a little Destiny thrown in here and there. It's very nice, but on the edge of too much, at least to my eyes. That's subjective, though, because there's nothing wrong with the look, it works, and you can easily tell the difference between the engine and the rudder of the ship.

In the centre of the space station, you can choose the missions you want to embark on. There are different things to achieve in the missions, from protecting other ships to destroying things. And then you can clearly see how difficult the missions are based on what you have to do, and if you want an easier mission, you just choose the one that seems easiest. That's what we did in the beginning, when we wanted to dip our toes in the water before jumping into the deep end. We tried both the four-man ship and the three-man ship. The four-man ship was quite difficult to navigate, so we switched to the three-man ship, which was a little easier to navigate. Yes, we were one man short, but that was actually just an advantage in the missions we were on.

The first mission we tried was to destroy some gun turrets that were protecting a base. Two of us had to control the guns and fire at both the gun turrets and the endless waves of enemy spaceships that wanted to harm us. Our third man ran the ship, which was necessary to prevent our ship from being shot down, and the fourth man ran around repairing things that needed it. It was pretty easy to do and a lot of fun, mostly because we quickly realised which role we each felt most comfortable with. After we managed to destroy the structure we had to shoot down, we jumped on to the mission where we had to hack a broadcasting station before it was destroyed by the aforementioned waves of ships. Here, one or two of us had to go to the station and hack things and activate things via batteries that had to be put in the right containers so that the computers we were hacking could boot up. I stayed in the gun turret, shooting at anything hostile, while the fourth man had to make sure the ship was close to the station so the guys hacking could get back to the station when they ran out of air. This went brilliantly until it didn't and we had to leave the station with our tails between our legs. However, we did have a partial success, which was a great success for our first real mission.

After a success, you get a result where you see everything you've won and the ability points you've gained. The ability points are then used to upgrade your character, which makes you better at different things that the game requires. You can become better at steering the ship, or you can, as I did, become more accurate in your shooting with the gun turrets. Here it was clear that people chose the things they already found the most fun, so they slowly got better at their roles. It's a really cool progression and it's super fun to play the missions together. It's not really what you have to do in the missions that's fun, but more the cooperation that you have. It helped that the four of us were on Discord and could talk to each other, because it made the experience much more intense and fun. The developers probably know this too, and that's probably why voice chat is built into the game.

However, it's not all positive, because Void Crew has a lot of bugs, which is natural for a game in Early Access. Half of the missions we went on had bugs that got us kicked out of the game. One of the missions we simply couldn't play because it wouldn't start, and the game crashed several times. However, Void Crew is so entertaining that we found ways to work around the bugs. So when three out of the four of us who were in the game got kicked out, the remaining one just invited us back in. And the mission that didn't work, we just avoided when we had to choose a mission. In this way, we got more and more in control of how to avoid wasting time and have fun with the game as it is. However, it should be mentioned that the game has many bugs beyond these bigger picture ones as it is now, even small things that I can't mention all of them, but it is constantly being updated, and a patch was released just last week, so the skeleton is there for something really special, but Void Crew needs a little more time in the oven without a doubt.

All in all, Void Crew is very exciting, and me and my little group of space travellers will follow the game's development very closely, and jump in every now and then for a fun game of space action.