Void Crew review – Sea of Thieves via FTL

A Sea of Thieves-style co-op game with roguelite structure where you pilot a spaceship instead of a shipship

Void Crew / Focus Entertainment

My friend jumps into a sci-fi sarcophagus to heal his beaten-up clone body, which the machine does with the sound of someone being – I don’t know how else I can say this – de-juiced; a horrible, slurping, juicy gulp of a noise. 

“Aha, I’m a genius,” he says. “I got it.” 

This is our best run so far, and what he’s got is timing. He juiced his body back up to just the right point so our meat juice stores don’t go below 90 points. These points are shared between us for heals and respawns. If they go below 90, we begin to freeze to death because of a relic that gives us extra ship power so long as we’re in the sweet spot above 90 and below 110 – the juice zone. 

“No, you didn’t,” I reply, pretending I didn’t just jump into my sarcophagus and slurp a single point of the sweet stuff. 

“What the hell, I’m sure I had it.” 

“You didn’t, mate.” 

“Kirk, what did you do? What did you do, Kirk? You’ve doomed us!” 

Void Crew / Focus Entertainment

Everything is freezing now and enemy fighters are bouncing lasers off our shields. Shields we now must disable because we have to break the relics (which will reduce our maximum power capacity) before we freeze to death. Hehehe. 

“Kirk!” 

I don’t know why I’m like this, but Void Crew turns me into even more of a little scamp. 

As the headline says, it’s essentially a Sea of Thieves-style co-op game where you pilot a spaceship instead of a shipship. The FTL comparison doesn’t just stop at the setting, though, as it’s also a roguelite where you travel between missions while being chased down by a much bigger ship that will tear you in half if you don’t hurry up. Freezing is bad. 

Void Crew / Focus Entertainment

The Incident, as we’ll call it, happened the first time we’d beaten the boss at the end of a system. We were rich beyond our wildest dreams in terms of hardpoints, damage-dealing cannons, and shields. On top of that, our hull was holding up. At least until The Incident. Still somehow less catastrophic than the time I switched the safety off the airlock and vented my pal into the void. 

A few days later, we’ve settled into our roles. I’ve stopped being a dick. We’re two bosses down, and my pal thinks it’s a good idea to take on one of the hardest missions, which has stealth mines. It’s not. 

One day we’ll crack it. 

Void Crew / Focus Entertainment

Void Crew does a great job of doling out the incremental upgrades. That last run netted me five level-ups, which allowed me to specialize even more as a gunner and open up 15 loot crates for some snazzy new threads, including a helmet projection of the “this is fine” meme. 

My friend takes the helm and handles most of the spacewalks, I take guns and interior engineering, but you can have up to four players and specialize even further. There’s also a bigger ship for larger crews, but we tried it and ended up not being able to tell which way around it was when we were running around inside, which isn’t ideal for tracking targets on the outside. 

Speaking of the outside, this is space, right? I don’t particularly like how the developers handle the concept of space – the infinite void that watches us as we sleep. It’s big, space. Void Crew makes space feel small because you’re limited to what I can only describe as a thick plane to travel along. You can ascend and descend, but only so much, and you certainly can’t flip the ship around. I realize this would create all kinds of physics problems with players inside the ships, but it is rather strange until you get used to it. 

Void Crew / Focus Entertainment

I also wish piloting was a little more deadly. Some of the best moments I’ve had in Elite: Dangerous sound dangerously boring on paper because they surround the docking procedure going wrong. Void Crew doesn’t let you collide with anything bigger than the odd bit of space junk – even enemy ships fly right through you, and you just stop on an invisible wall when you try to park close to a space station. It’d make the game feel much more dynamic if the pilot had to be actually good. 

Void Crew is some of the most fun I’ve had in co-op. The structure of a roguelite really lends itself to a Sea of Thieves-style co-op game. I wish there were more ship types, performance gets a bit choppy when you’re using the in-game computers, and I’m not a huge fan of how piloting works, but I’ve already put 40 hours into Void Crew and I reckon I have another 40 in me. Now give me some more ships to play with (please). And let me crash them (please, for non-scamp reasons).

Score: 8/10

Version tested: PC