Voidling Bound review

If you’ve spent time with the Skylanders series, Voidling Bound will probably feel familiar. And that’s not a coincidence. Four key developers from Hatchery Games worked on Activision’s franchise and their influence is hard to miss. From combat with a variety of cartoonish creatures, the exploration of vibrant-colored worlds, to an emphasis on augmenting your team of playables, Voidling Bound often feels like a spiritual successor to Activision’s Toys-to-Life phenomenon.

But thankfully, Hatchery Games isn’t content with imitating what came before. Instead, the indie team took some of the basic concepts of Skylanders and pushed them into interesting directions. While Voidling’s ending might not provide much closure and the game feels just a bit light on substance, the game’s sense of discovery help make up for any shortcomings.

Rounding Up Those Little Voidlings

Essentially, Voidling Bound is split into two different experinces. Part of the game places you in the role of a Space Wrangler. From this management-focused perspective, you’re responsible for selecting missions, overseeing your growing collection of Voidlings, and guiding their development through a rather robust evolution and augmentation system. As your adventure progresses, this layer grows deeper. What starts as a straightforward upgrade tree eventually expands into gene splicing, allowing you to combine traits from different creatures and create entirely new Voidlings that would have never appearred through natural evolution alone.

Intriguingly, the gene splicing system encourages some experimentation by letting you mix and match physical traits, elemental affinities, and combat abilities. Rather than simply discovering the next evolutionary stage, you’re engineering your own creatures, and that’s a nice rewarding after a stretch of Voidling raising. Best of all, it’s a fairly robust system that gives the game a sense of personalization. Before long, your roster can feel less like a family of bizarre science experiments that you’ve crafted yourself. If you were ever engrossed by Spore’s possibilities, the title generates the same kind of gratification as you cook up your own creatures.

“I Fell into a Burning Ring of Fire”

Of course, the real fun comes when you take those creations into battle. When your Space Wrangler’s psyche enters a Voidling, the game shifts into a combiantion of exploration, platforming, and plenty of combat. Pleasingly, each creature phas their own assortment of abilities that are tied to cooldown timers. While the action is always fast and accesible, success is rooted in a strategic use of attacks rather than repeative button-mashing. As your Voidlings evolve, they gain additional skills and elemental attributes that can change how they play, which helps to keep combat from growing stale to quickly.

One of my favorite examples was a fire-loving Gilick that evolved into a pyromaniac menace on the battlefield. Through various upgrades and evolutions, it gained the ability to cummon a ring of flames whenever it performed an area-of-effect attack. On its own, that was useful for crowd control. But things became much more interesting when jumping through the ring would spread molten lava across the surrounding area. Suddenly, encounters has a bit of a Tony Hawk-style vibe, where tricking could melt lesser enemies.

Ending the Purple Reign

Occasionally, Voidling’s environments showcase this kind of creativity. Levels are generally large and encourage exploration, with plenty of hidden alcoves, side paths, and resource caches tucked away off the main route. Often, there’s always something worth investigating around that suspicious-looking corner. But at the same time, some areas can feel just a little too spacious for their own good. Despite their impressive scale, there are moments when the environments can feel a bit empty, making traversal between zones take just a bit longer than you’d want.

Fortunately, the game’s environmental design can help to offset the issue. Bound employs bright colors and exotic-looking landscapes that are consistently enjoyable to look at. Odd rock formations, sprouts of unruly vegetation, and otherworldly vistas give each biome a pretty distinct personality. The game also makes good use of color as a gameplay tool. Purple is frequently used to signal danger, hazards, or corruption, making it easy to identify threats, especially during chaotic encounters.

Survey or Survive to Evolve

Voidling’s stages have two typed of mission. Some focus on exploration and platforming, allowing you to chase down hidden eggs and resources when you’re not following a waypoint marker. Other levels will throw you in wave-based combat arenas where survival is the main objective. Both mission types habitually culminate in a boss encounter that significantly raises the intensity. These larger battles often require you to draw on your complete toolkit as you identify attack patterns and environmental hazards.

On Steam Deck, the game’s performance is generally quite solid. Running on medium settings, the game maintains a smooth 60 frames per second for the majority of the experience. Exploration, platforming, and standard combat are all smooth, making the game great for portable play. The only significant performance dips occur during boss encounters. Many bosses summon waves of subordinate enemies, and when the battlefield becomes crowded with minions, effects, and ability animations, slowdown can occur. Thankfully, these moments are relatively infrequent and don’t effect play too much.

The Sound of Silence

And while there’s a lot to like, Voidling Bound isn’t without its shortcomings. One of the most noticeable omissions is a complete lack of voice acting. The game’s colorful cast of creatures and characters feels like it would be elevated voiced dialogue. The absence of spoken performances makes certain story moments feel flat. What’s more, except for an opening cinematic, I didn’t feel that my Space Wrangler and his menagerie of Voidlings shared a bond. Hearing these characters interact might have given the story a bit more personality.

Another questionable design choice appears later in the game with the introduction of the gym system. This facility allows players to automatically level a Voidling from level 15 to level 20, removing some of the grinding needed to level cap a creature. Unfortunately, the process includes a real-time delay before training completes. While it’s not especially lengthy and completes while you’re out on mission, the mechanic feels reminiscent of a mobile game timer. Waiting for a creature to finish training doesn’t add anything to the experience and feels at odds with the otherwise player-friendly progression system.

The biggest issue, however, stems from one of the game’s core design philosophies. Voidling Bound never forces players to use specific creatures. In theory, that’s a positive thing. You can tackle misions with whichever Voidling you enjoy most, and nearly every stage can be cleared regardless of your companion’s elemental affinity. The downside is that the game doesn’t provide enough incentive to regularly rotate through your collection. Because your favorite creature can handle most challenges without issue, it’s easy to stick with a single build and ignore the rest of your cultivated roster. For a game centered around collecting, evolving, and creating unique creatures, that feels like a missed opportunity. Lastly, the end game feels a bit rushed. A Void Strikes mode where you’re offered to keep your winning or venture on against tougher opponents is competent, but doesn’t offer much closure on things.

The Skylanders Successor We Probably Didn’t Expect

Sure, Voidling Bound might not reach the same cultural heights as Skylanders, but it successfully rekindles much of what made that series special while forging its own identity. Between the creature customization, satisfying combat, and sense of discovery, there’s the feeling that the next evolution, upgrade, or bizarre genetic experiment is just around the corner. And that’s what makes this game so fun.

There are a few rough edges that prevent it from achieving greatness, but the core experience is undeniably compelling. If Hatchery Games continues to build on these ideas, Voidling Bound could be the start of something truly special. For now, it’s one of the most enjoyable creature-collecting action games in recent memory. If you miss Stealth Elf, Trigger Happy, and Drobot, as much as I do, then Voiding comes close to being essential.

Voidling Bound was played on PC with review code provided by the publisher.