Void Crew is a 1-6 player co-operative space-ship game that if I had to compare to anything, plays a little bit like Sea of Thieves in space. Launching into early access on Steam back in 2023, it’s now hit 1.0 and is arriving on console, with full cross play firmly stowed in the ships hold. It’s chaotic, funny and unfortunately a little bit frustrating. I’ve been getting some space miles in over the last week to share my thoughts. Let’s jump into the void in our Void Crew ‘review-in-progress.’
Into The Void
The general premise of Void Crew is pretty simple. Gather a crew (while you can play solo in Void Crew, I’d rather not, thank you very much), man a ship, and tackle The Hollow, a collective group of baddies that aren’t particularly fleshed out, but definitely want to kill us. You play as an ‘Ectype’ for a faction known as ‘Metem’. There’s a lot of religious undertone to the overall fiction of Void Crew, with the runs you take being called ‘Pilgrimages’. Either way, it’s your job to go out there, take on the bad guys and find the Garden. Is it a paradise for humanity? Who knows, but the Hollow seemingly oppose us finding out.
Once you’ve gathered your motley crew, you can pick a class, be it Pilot, Gunner, Engineer or Scavenger. To be honest, players can multitask regardless of whichever class they’ve chosen, but there are skills and benefits to each when you stick to your predefined role. Those roles are pretty self-explanatory. I predominantly played as the Pilot, flying the ship and manoeuvring in combat. My team of engineers managed the ships void-drive, repairs and ensured my boosters were charged. Gunners placed different weapon in locations throughout the ship and managed our defences. No-one on the team picked the Scavenger class, but the focus for this role seemed to be on doing things outside of the ship better than the rest of us.
There’s a tutorial for the various systems at play here before you get stuck in, and in Void Crew, getting stuck in is kind of the point. You’ll be tackling all sorts of busy work, from charging the void drive or boosts, powering up emplacements, repairing damaged systems or going EVA to collect supplies and make hull repairs.
Chaos Reigns
Void Crew is run based roguelite – I know, I know, everything seem to be a roguelite or a souls-like nowadays? The premise works here, hooking players on taking more and more risks, upgrading their player character and their ship to achieve success.
On each run you’ll have the opportunity to not only level up your role, but also gather new blueprints for better ship systems, be it more powerful gun emplacements or better shields. To go out on a pilgrimage, you’ll first jump into the Void and then pick up to three different missions, and they can be pretty varied, from salvage operations, attacking an enemy carrier to retrieving data modules. Once you arrive in system, a timer will start before overwhelming enemy reinforcements arrive. It’s up to you to see how far you can push things, and how quickly you can get your objectives completed.
Each successfully completed mission rewards us with new blueprints and upgrades, and allows us to jump into back to the void to pick another. If we die, all run progress is lost, though any weapon blueprints we’ve successfully plonked into our fabricator are saved for the next outage, should we have the alloys to build them.
Flying the ship is slow and cumbersome, and some of the early gear feels very underpowered, but that’s sort of the point. Void Crew gives you time to ease into how it wants to be played, and it is, primarily, a lot of fun and if you enjoy multiplayer jaunts like Sea of Thieves. Having an efficient crew all doing what they’re supposed to be doing is very entertaining. As the game throws more and more at you, that order will inevitably start to fracture, and really, that’s where the game shines. It’s full of neat ideas, and I love it for that.
Design Decisions
Sadly, at least on Console, Void Crew is rough around the edges. Outside of some wonky performance, and pretty flat lighting, Void Crew’s most frustrating aspect is the UI and menus with which we have to interact with the game. I appreciate that its made by a small team, but the menu system we’re forced to navigate regularly was clearly built for a mouse pointer, and has not translated well at all to controller.
There’s multiple issues here. There seem to be some missing animations when menu buttons should be held down, from scanning enemy ships to locking things in place, which feels confusing. There are hints that pop up to guide players throughout the game, and they can be dismissed with a press of the B button. Sadly, this also back us out of whatever terminal we’re interacting with. The UI is oddly spaced out, with elements almost cut off at the edges of the screen. While you can get around it with the D-pad, it just doesn’t flow well and is a pain to use.
Running out of air is pretty rough, rendering your view almost non-existant, making it virtually impossible to make it back if you get too low. We also encountered an issue where our progress was lost entirely, with both myself and another player losing all the investments made into our skill tree after 3 hours, forcing us to start again. I haven’t been able to replicate it again, so maybe it was a one-off, but folks should be warned regardless. The developers of Void Crew have created a wonderfully fun gameplay loop here, one that I really enjoyed when it all came together but these sort of issues firmly stand in the way of finding that fun, and honestly, that’s the most frustrating thing of all. I would hope for some patches and improvements as soon as they can get around to it.
Course Locked-in
I’ve decided to make this a review-in-progress, rather than a final score, for a couple of reasons. The first is that getting 4-6 players together to pump in twenty or so hours in a week is a tough ask, and I want to play a bit more before I render a final verdict. I also feel like Void Crew is the sort of game I could recommend, especially for gamers that enjoy the chaos of multiplayer co-operative games. However, that recommendation can only come once it’s had a few more patches to resolve what I feel are some pretty glaring issues. Until then, fans of these sorts of titles should be aware that the fun is in there, but there are number of issues standing in the way of finding it. Perhaps they’re lost in the Void?
Void Crew
Played on
Xbox Series X
PROS
- Fun, chaotic co-operative Multiplayer
- Has some smart ideas
CONS
- The worst UI I've had to endure in quite some time
- Some performance hitches and progression bugs
- Lighting is very flat
