Evolve Your Living Weapons - Voidling Bound

I had been watching a random video on YouTube regarding hidden gems you might have missed during that month in video games, and near the end of the video the presenter spoke about 'Voidling Bound', he spoke fondly of the polish the game had, despite being a much smaller in scope, but tackling a pretty interesting form of creature capture - evolution. I saw the gameplay, and as someone who had pretty much sworn off WarFrame (Note: I have 1000+ hours in Warframe and I've been playing since 2016, I stopped in 2024), it gave me that kind of vibe, so I decided to download the demo on Steam, and it is easily one of the best games I had played in a long time. I was so enamored at the game, that I bought it on the spot, a full fat 24.99 US dollars. Absolutely worth every penny.

Voidling Bound is a RPG-shooter hybrid, where you take control of one of 9 creatures, each with up to 32 different forms or 'evolutions', and you battle through four different kinds of hordes as you explore 4 worlds, before diving into the abyss.

Gameplay & Gameplay Loop

The game is exactly what you expect, and nothing like what you expect. The game is a third person action shooter, with deep RPG elements. Each creature you are in control of plays wildly different from the others, and often requires you to adjust your playstyle to match.

The main gameplay loop is you go into a level, you clear out these purple blobs, called corruption. You eventually reach to a final boss battle after you clear enough of the purple blobs. Each boss battle is different and has some sort of unique feature that helps it stand out from the others.

As you explore the stages you will come across enemies from the faction that currently inhabits the stage. There are multiple factions that you will come across as you get deeper into the game's levels. In later levels there will be multiple factions per level, and since your voidling's elements are usually only effective against one or two factions, you'll need to build your voidlings to be effective, or swap out your voidlings between stages for maximum impact.

You have three primary ways of attacks, your primary, secondary, and passive. Primary is usually not on a cool down, but your secondary is. For some of the voidlings, the primary and secondary work together to do damage, this can appear to be much slower at first, but eventually once you get used to it, and you build your voidling with it specifically in mind, you can do some serious damage.

Level Design

The game carries you across three primary worlds. Each with its own unique theme and setting. One is a tropical, jungle type planet. One is a frost world, and one is a desert/grand canyon style world that has ancient ruins that dive deep into. The finally there is the abyss, which is simultaneous all of the previous worlds, but with a more etheral, cosmic background style in its presentation.

Each of these worlds has several maps to explore, with each been a very immerse dense experience. You actually are encouraged to explore and go off the beaten path to find eggs, collectables, DNA points, and mutagens as well. It is actually quite a rewarding experience, and to top it all off, the levels usually have some pretty impressive vistas that you can stare at from time to time.

There isn't much issues I had with the level design, as the levels are pretty good at indicating where you should be going, I will admit however, I didn't know you could go into some of the buildings in the earlier stages, and it wasn't really used all that much later on, if I recall right, it was maybe a handful after the first world that there were buildings to explore.

Battle Mechanics

Each voidling has two primary movies. A Primary Attack and a secondary attack. Together with these two and your passives, you make your way through hordes of enemies.

You can enhance your voildings, using research that you gain while exploring, completing challenges and trading in excess items. This research points, is then funneled into a very large tech tree for each of the voidlings, it seems overwhelming at first, but once you start to get research points it pretty much melts away. This acts as your primary 'power up' mode, outside of your stat changes, which are mostly affected via breeding.

The game treats your voidlings as a gun basically. Where you running around, and spit, fire, or sometimes lunge at the various enemies mobs to destroy them. Your secondary fire can do anything from creating an area of effect attack, to creating random mobs that fight for you.

Each of the voidlings have different play styles, and there are some like the Nimiod, which is a squid like creature that floats, that does take quite a getting used to. It floats, and it jumps very high, you have to use your secondary fire to create 'pillars' which has a range, and your primary fire goes to the pillars and then the 'pillars' relay the attacks to the enemies. There is great potential here if you build it out right. Morfang is a more of slash and dash type creature, that uses its claws as its primary fire, and its secondary is usually a lunge depending on the elemental build you have. The other voidlings also have their own way of doing things.

If you have played First Person Games, or games like Overwatch or Marvel Rivals, you basically understand how the core of the battle plays out.

Sound & FX

I always like to keep a mention about sound and sound effects, in all honesty, this was great! It made every action feel weighty and like it had impact. There are several instances where the little sounds here and there added to the world, and the environment.

From the way the final battles took place, to the collections of mutagens and even the the audio cues when there are at least two dozen enemies on screen, everything felt fully thought out, and you could easily map and experience anything that you might need in order to make another decision to continue forward in the game.

I didn't keep much notes about them, but it is something that stood out to me while I played the game.

Evolution and Evolution Mechanics

One of the stand out features of this game is the Evolutions. The creatures themselves don't have a set evolution at a particular level, rather you 'build' your creature using elemental orbs you find across the stages. Each stage requires a different amount of elemental orbs. These orbs can be: Organic, Cryo, Pyro, Cyber, and Plasma. Each voidling that you come across will only have two branches available for you. For example, Kwipeck - one of the first voidlings you get - has two branching evolutions at the start, Organic and Pyro.

Other types are either found via breeding, or via in eggs in the stages. It is possible that you won't randomly encounter the rest of the voidlings' evolutions, and will have to intentfully look into completely the entries.

However, each time you invest elemental orbs into a particular branch, two more stages open up using that same element. Each time you pick a branch, and further two stages open up, but you can only pick one per evolution. Each time you pick a stage you will gain a new moveset, or a new passive. But also you will gain different cosmetics that you can use to splice into other voidlings when you are using the Gene Splicer to create your own builds.

Each evolution creates a denser visual skin for each of your voidlings. The truth is you'll need to raise and evolve a handful of each creature so that you can unlock all the movesets, passives, and cosmetics, so that you can you build the voidling into the specific style that you will want to use in the end game.

Each of the creatures has up to 31 different evolutions, and they each unique, usually because of the cosmetics they have attached to them. You'll need to collect them all, and it can get pretty intense, since you actually have access to all of them to evolve, some you'll need to cross breed, some you'll need to find out in the world. After every stage you are awarded eggs, and you will find eggs on the various stages that you can use to incubate and hatch.

Breeding Mechanics

Speaking of hatching, breeding, and the like. The game's breeding mechanics are pretty normal as far as breeding goes. But there might be some limits. I have been trying to breed stat level 10s across the board, but there are multiple instances where those are being limited to 8. I never bothered to read any of the documentation online while I was playing, but I found that pretty unusual, since I know for a fact I may need the higher stats in the end game.

Basically, only the same two kinds of voidlings are be bred together, and they get a range of stats based on the minimum base that each parent has. For example, if you have a base attack stat level 7, being bred with a base attack stat level 1, the child will have a potential base of 1-7 for the attack stat, however, if both have base attack stat level of 7, then the minimum base for the child will be 7! This is how I deduced all the stat levels to work, there is a pretty easy graphic that shows you the range when you select both for breeding.

I will admit, there are probably more things to discover in the breeding mechanics of this game, but despite completing the game, I don't believe I discovered everything.

Gene Splicing

There are over 1000 individual genes that you can use to build your voidling from across all the voidlings. They are broken up into several sections. Modules, which add stat boosts and are tied to visual indicators such as fur, tail type, ears etc. Esthetics, which provide no stat changes, but are usually the colours and patterns for the various parts of your voidlings. Ability Variants, which are broken up into Primary Ability, Secondary Ability, and Mutated perks. Each of these allows you to select any kind of abilities and mix and match them with elements that they didn't originate from, allowing you to create more interesting and complex battles.

It also provides you with 'Mutated Perks'. These can range from double jump to expanding the AoE for certain moves, or something else entirely. Each voidling has its own set of perks that you can mix and match. That means you can take the perks from one voidling and splice it into another one. You can use this to make overpowered synergies. Which is how I imagine the developers intended it.

Once you splice a voidling they can no longer be bred, so you're going to have to think long and hard about it, and probably keep copies in case.

Leveling

Each voidling can only go up to level 20. Each time you level up, you get a new stat point to pour into your voidling, In the beginning, you will have all your stats set to 1, but as you discover new quality of eggs, you evolve, and breed, and find more voidlings with different modifiers, your starting stats can be higher, in some cases it can start at 7 or 8 in a stat. You will typically want to breed your voidlings to get higher base stats that will help you later in the game.

In the beginning of the game you will have to manually level up your voidlings by defeating enemies and completing the stages, often requiring you to complete the stage multiple times. However, as the game progresses, you will be given access to a Gym, where you can leave your voidlings for a set length of time (as in real world time - just play a couple of stages and you'll be fine), and they'll level up. As you invest more research into the gym, you will unlock more machines that will allow you to level all the way up to max level.

This is useful for late game when you're trying to breed the voidlings and create specific builds.

Conclusion

I tried to touch on as many systems that the game offers in this short review, but the truth is, the game is quite expansive, and there quite a lot of fun to be had here, from the lore, the endless abyss where you can continue to refine your builds to get deeper and deeper, and you can spend hours designing your favourite voidling, your personal customization of it. But there is a lot of depth and complexity, that I highly encourage you all to go out there and actually try it.

I am just going to come out and say it. Buy this game at full price right now. There is so much care and polish in this game, oozing charm in every system. There are fun designs, and extremely replayable for those of you all who really want to get into the nitty gritty of evolutions and min-maxing using the breeding system.

The game's core loop is strong, and you are actively rewarded for it. I cannot stress how good of a game Voidling Bound is. There is a fantastic array of potential here, and I cannot wait to see what Hatchery Games has in store for us next.