Voidling Bound Review — The Creatures are a Feature

I love creature-collection games. I’ve loved them ever since I was a kid and got the chance to play Pokémon on the Game Boy Color. At the time, my screen access was severely limited, but our little bin of Game Boys didn’t count toward my two hours a day of allotted video game time. Why, exactly, I couldn’t tell you, but it felt like a little real-life cheat code where I got to play a legendary game during the time I otherwise would have spent reading or playing outside.

I’m also a big fan of RPG shooters, a term loosely referring to titles with big RPG progression mechanics and FPS or TPS gameplay. If you’ve read my review of Borderlands 4, you already know that I’ve sunk thousands of hours into the franchise over the years. I have core memories, both good and bad, ingrained with the many standout boss fights across Borderlands 2 and Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel that will never leave me.

It seems like a perfect fit, then, that I would get the chance to review Voidling Bound, a creature-collecting RPG shooter that takes players through space fighting horrific monsters and evolving adorably weird alien critters in the process.

When it comes to creature collectors, Voidling Bound is definitely the most unique that I have ever personally played. The setting itself is something special for the genre. Being straight-up sci-fi, the game has you chasing down man-made horrors that destroy the environment and threaten to outright kill all life in the galaxy, human and alien alike. It’s a tone that feels more intensely upfront than others, and the very alien look of the… well, aliens that you bond with is very unique for a genre defined by more cartoonish designs.

Mechanically speaking, Voidling Bound is also very unique for its genre in that it plays as a third-person shooter rather than a turn-based combat strategy game. Each mission has you taking control of your Voidling, using its unique attacks and abilities to survive and clear a variety of levels that can vary from wave survival to the platforming shooter levels of the PS2 era. Boss fights are abundant and introduce a bullet-hell-like element, where each creature has its own method of dealing with.

By gaining experience and collecting resources in these levels, you can level up your creature’s stats, evolve them into new forms, and develop species-wide passive improvements. The game drives you not only to evolve one creature fully, but to continue to collect other versions of that same creature to build a roster of unique Voidlings to take on different challenges.

At least, it does in theory. The truth is that, despite there being upgrades that apply to every single Voidling of a species that you capture, there is very little reason to have more than one of each kind, or even more than a handful across the entire game. Upgrading your Voidlings turns them into powerful stat sticks that can clear almost any challenge, with their chosen elements being useful, but you’re never gatekept from success because you chose the wrong one. Your chosen playstyle also greatly affects which Voidling you want to play, with each creature’s unique main attack making the biggest difference in who you choose to take on a mission.

That is to say that, while the game really wants you to collect and evolve multiple copies of the same species, it’s an entirely unnecessary system. Even pulling a rare variant of a Voidling from an egg, which is essentially the game’s version of loot boxes and the only way to procure Voidlings, doesn’t tempt me to swap it in to replace my higher-evolved version. To give you an example of what I’m talking about, I had managed to evolve the starting creature to such a state that I could reliably use it to clear much of the game’s content, and this was before I even picked up my second creature.

It would be cool if, say, we could bring multiple Voidlings into a mission and swap them out at will, which might incentivize me to build more than one. Again, though, there really is no reason to do so, and you’ll likely be sticking to one creature you really like the look or playstyle of until another comes along that outranks it in those regards.

The game’s shooting mechanics are really solid. The unique playstyles of each Voidling are clever, and only made all the more so as you evolve them and mutate their playstyle. Turning my starting creature into a fire-stacking, rapid-firing monster that emptied its “magazine” in the blink of an eye was a very fun experience, and I appreciate that each creature has a series of very different paths to branch out on.

There isn’t a lot to complain about with Voidling Bound. The game runs smoothly, and though I criticized one element of its gameplay, it is still incredibly fun to play, and I really got hooked on the system of chasing evolutions. That is, however, sort of the apex of the game. The story doesn’t progress in a particularly meaningful way, and the missions follow the same rotating cycle of different game modes. You’re in it to find, catch, and upgrade all of the different Voidlings, which is the same call in any creature collector. Voidling Bound captures this desire really well and keeps you hooked on it all the way through, though once your favorites are fully upgraded and there are no more creatures to find, you might start to lose interest in continuing.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Voidling Bound. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Voidling Bound is available on Steam.