Voidtrain | Review

Jesse 'Doncabesa' Norris November 6, 2025Last Updated: November 6, 2025

1 5,467 6 minutes read

Now and then, a game comes out of nowhere and grabs you by the ghoulies. It wraps itself around your brain, and all you want to do is play just a little bit longer. Voidtrain, which has been in early access since August 2021, got its hooks into me. For 25 hours, I dove into the void, gathered resources while fighting off foes, and built a train that took me through one hell of a journey.

The Void

The game begins with a cutscene explaining how your player character walked into a shelter and fell into the Void. Who you are, why you’re there, and what the hell is going on are slowly doled out over the next 25 or so hours.

I think the ‘accidental’ story is worth experiencing first-hand, so I’ll keep it as spoiler-lite as possible. I say accidental because, best as I can tell, the devs didn’t have this emotional gut punch of a tale in the plans when development first started. Your conductor, or team of train workers, as the game supports up to 4 player co-op, will venture through the void on the trail of ‘The Scientist’.

Who this scientist is, what he’s done to the Void’s inhabitants, and just what the Void itself is gets told slowly via a mix of cutscenes and voiceover work. The latter is surprisingly good; hell, everything in this game surprised me with its high-quality levels. Part of the game’s 1.0 release on November 7^th across PC and Xbox (including a Day One Game Pass drop) is the 3^rd and final story chapter for those who have been playing in early access on PC.

The TL:DR of things is that you fall into a realm known as the Void. Inside it, you’ll slowly build up a train you come across, which will carry you along a set of floating rails. On the train and in a small bubble above it, there is gravity. Outside of that area and a few islands/depots, there is no gravity. In this vast expanse of seeming endlessness, you’ll find the resources needed to build a truly powerful locomotive, full of food, furry friends, and lots of guns.

Survival Crafting That Is Really Fun

Voidtrain takes the survival-crafting genre and makes it digestible. Every resource you need is in a small area around your train as it heads down the tracks. Early on, you must do everything manually. Playing solo meant a bit of tedium as I had little automation for the first few hours. At a pretty decent clip, you will unlock various mechanics that help automate the more tedious tasks while still allowing you enough agency to control what you want.

Every item in the game is made up of base parts: scrap metal, wood, chemicals, and so on. Almost all of these items can be found floating in a spherical area around the train you are travelling on. Progression in the game is tied to sacrificing some of these materials to get research points, with which you can unlock all of your crafting recipes and upgrades.

If you have played any survival crafting games, then you will know what you’re in for, gameplay loop, and inventory UI-wise. Where Voidtrain exceeds expectations is in its movement and combat. Swimming through the Void, running around my train, and blasting enemies in the face felt fantastic on PC.

The best part of the game’s resource-focused gameplay loop is that you never have to stumble around desperately searching for specific items. It’s always going to be around your train or at the next depot.

Aggressive AI, by default

At certain points during your journey, scenarios can crop up at random. There are checkpoints full of enemy combatants who want to murder you dead. The game starts you off with an infinite ammo revolver that deals heavy damage. The downside is a four-shot limit before reloading, which is also slow. As you kill enemies, they’ll drop weapon parts, and eventually entire guns.

The shooting felt great on PC, both on mouse & keyboard and controller. One area that was a bit annoying was how insanely aggressive the enemy AI is by default. The moment you pop your head out or they run from cover, the shots start flying at you from all angles. They are super aggressive by default and if you have not used the game’s variety of difficulty options, you will die quickly. Thankfully, version 1.0 added enemy aggression and accuracy toggles. I highly recommend using both if you’re playing solo.

Healing can be done in two ways. If you are satiated enough by food, mainly boiling water or frying up ‘organics’ you grow in little farms, then you will heal up over time. You can also craft bandages using leather, a tough-to-get resource, as it must be acquired by killing certain animal-type enemies and isn’t free-floating in space.

Combat is fun, though I found myself avoiding it as I got deeper into the game. Once my weapons were powerful enough, there wasn’t a huge incentive to seek combat out, whether it was another train pulling up beside me or heading to the combat area in every depot.

Ample Variety

Another strength for Voidtrain is the variety of its gameplay systems and story beats. The pacing is excellent, allowing me to focus on my train when I want to or move things along quickly when the next story beat feels near. To fully build new parts of a train, you’ll need to be in a depot and have the right parts.

Finding what you need in the Void only works if you have places to store them. The tried-and-true storage box system is here with enough starting space to keep frustration down. You’ll build furnaces to smelt iron, copper, steel, and brass. It’s just deep enough to give you a feeling of progression without putting too many spinning plates in front of you.

To help with all of the water collecting, food growing, train maintenance, and more are two helpers from the Void. Rofleemos, who are key to the game’s story, help to automate ship systems and find items out in the Void. You can name them, feed them mushrooms to keep them happy, and they’ll give your train passive benefits.

Lootcatchers are small, cute creatures who, in exchange for fresh water, will teleport into the void and puke up whatever they find. By the end of my run, I had 13 Rofleemo and a similar number of Lootcatchers helping keep my train in top shape. Loot containers were constantly full, allowing me to focus on decorating train cars, reloading my Rofleemo turret stations, and joining in as they shot down enemies, sharks, and more. Those sharks are a constant threat, forcing you to keep on your toes as these Void baddies are an ever-looming worry, unless you dig into the game’s accessibility options.

Well-Tuned

Accessibility is key in the survival genre. Voidtrain excels in letting you make the game both far easier and far more difficult than its amply tough default settings. You can choose to remove Sharks from the game entirely or have an extra one to worry about. Make your stacks of materials half the normal size or twice as big; the choice is yours.

I found myself keeping the difficulty options at the default and upping my stack size. As a solo player, it let me focus more on building, crafting, combat, and exploration instead of constantly grinding out new materials and building extra storage.

That exploration is assisted by your winch system. Certain terrain, mainly that which looks like giant yellow donuts, lets you winch onto them and explore away from your vessel. These are mostly tied to story beats, with a few derailed train cars showing up at random and offering up a large amount of high-end loot.

Voidtrain ran fantastically for me, as well. Playing on my home PC and the Xbox Ally X, it rarely dipped below a locked 100 on my PC and a locked 60 on the Ally. A few later sections with heavy fog effects knocked things down for a few seconds at a time. With this level of performance, while still looking damned good, I’m confident that it should perform well on consoles. Finally, the story, music, and voice acting are all of a high quality. The humorous writing knows when to back off and let things take a serious turn, as well.

Wrapping Things Up

Voidtrain is a fantastic game in a genre I rarely enjoy. Hypetrain Digital deftly weaves an intriguing, emotional story into a thoroughly enjoyable gameplay loop. It’s launching into 1.0 on Xbox Game Pass, and it is well worth checking out solo or with friends.