I could tell Mycopunk and I were gonna be good friends when its developers started trolling each other in the hub area. While one dev streaming for a room of press over Discord showed off the upgrade system, another bounced around the spaceship interior firing stray rockets at our demoist. A third dev started grinding on rails in the background as a fourth tried to drive a hot rod up a wall.
We all know what that's like: The antsy dance of a friend group not-so-patiently waiting for one guy to get back from the bathroom, finish fiddling with menus, or just pick a mission already. Co-op games need these little distractions to bridge gaps between the action, whether it's tossing a ball into a hoop, taking target practice on dummies, or parkouring across every handrail, ledge, and invisible barrier in the area.
I take it as an excellent sign that indie outfit Pigeons at Play gets this and made its hub one big toy box.
Mycopunk, the team's debut game, was born out of a love for malleable, highly replayable co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic, Borderlands, Risk of Rain 2, and Helldivers 2. Before it was a fully realized shooter backed by Devolver Digital, it was the senior year university project of some founding devs. The goal was simple: "Let's make a game we want to play together," a common mantra in game development, but not one always reflected in the final product. Mycopunk, with its grotesque art style and totally unique enemy designs, feels like an exception.
Mycopunk is the sort of co-op FPS that doesn't come along as often as I'd like, as basic as it sounds:
- Mission-based
- Packed with modifiers
- Persistent progression
- Not a whiff of roguelike stuff
You play as dusty little robots sent down to de-funk planets that have serious fungal problems. Each bot has its own abilities and movement styles that evoke the many flavors of acrobatic shooters—a cowboy with a directional dash, a junkhead with a grapple hook, and my personal favorite, a rocketeer who can fly in short bursts.
A few of the bots can fill a support role, like Glider's rockets that hurt enemies but heal allies, but the classes aren't as strict as Deep Rock Galactic's dwarves. Any character can use any gun, for instance.
After meeting Roachard, a human-sized talking roach who's also the ship captain, I wondered if Mycopunk was going to be another game about shooting hordes of bugs, something I'd never complain about, but its true villains are way weirder and somehow grosser—creepy crawly robo-organic hybrids with an armored core. The fungal-armed freaks sprout up from the ground and weaponize whatever scrap was left lying around, including the dismembered guns and blades of the deceased.
You can target limbs and joints to shoot off a crawler's guns or dislodge their blades, but the only way to finally kill one is to chip away at its core until the squishy middle is revealed. It's a neat combat dynamic that makes enemy waves more than ammo-dumping on bullet sponges.
Crawlers have weak points and armor plating that some guns won't penetrate, so I was always making little micro choices about what targets to prioritize and which part of them to shoot at. Do I focus on the core, or try to slice off that sniper arm that almost killed me?
One caveat: We had to turn the difficulty up two notches to consistently fight the nine-limbed monstrosities that got our pulses racing. Crawlers barely registered as a threat at lower levels, and there were so few of them that we rarely felt the need to use our cool movement abilities to get around. Like Helldivers 2, Mycopunk only gets better with chaos.
The demo only scratched the surface, but I'm digging Mycopunk's upgrades. Completing missions earns weapon mods and ability modifiers equipped in a way I've never seen before: Each upgrade is a pattern mapped on a hexagonal grid in the shape of chemical compounds. How much space it takes up depends on its rarity, and the idea is to use a mix of smaller common pieces and rares that snap together.
The few exotic and rare mods I found could take up as much as half of my gun's total upgrade grid, but they're worth it for how completely they transform a gun's behavior. Some examples:
- Volatile battery (DMLR rifle): Throw used magazines on reload to deal a shock explosion. Shoot the discarded mag to cause a second, larger explosion. Explosion power increases when less ammo is tossed.
- Infinity Burn (Cycler SMG): Gain infinite ammo. Sustained fire damages you according to this gun's element.
- Scatterburst (Swarm Launcher): Fire all pellets at once. Magazine size is decreased.
Mycopunk is nailing everything I look for in a co-op shooter, but more importantly, it's passing the friend test with high marks. A couple of hours in, we were that demo group fiddling with upgrades, testing out loadouts, and mercilessly trolling each other before the next mission. I can't wait to see the whole thing.
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