Mycopunk Review: It's Deep Rock Galactic With a Fungal Infection

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There's a complex science to differentiating between first-person shooter games. The movement shooter is the antithesis of the military simulation, and you can't be any farther away from a boomer shooter than a battle royale. A slurry of subgenre archetypes, tags and "gameplay feels" serve as the building blocks for FPS taxonomy, creating a tried-and-true system to organize new games.

That's why it's all the more thrilling when a new experience resists being cleanly categorized. Yes, developer Pigeons at Play's Mycopunk was obviously inspired by Deep Rock Galactic. You're dropping onto the surface of a dangerous planet to solve a megacorp's problems, air out hordes of enemies, collect some shiny loot and extract with your friends.

But Mycopunk is also a grab bag of the greatest mechanics from FPS subgenres across the spectrum, combining team-based hero abilities, dynamic movement mechanics and impactful gunplay with classic co-op horde shooter action to great effect. There's a lot to love in this game, no matter which shooters usually appeal to you.

Strap in, drop down and get ready to be a wage slave

If you're familiar with Deep Rock Galactic, you'll quickly acclimate to life on New Atlas.

You're trading in your pickaxe, beard and short stature for a metal chassis as one of the Saxon Corporation's robotic employees. The megacorporation has vested interests (and many expensive assets) down on the planet's surface, but a mysterious threat has taken over the company's research facilities -- a fungal growth sprawling across planets that you'll need to exterminate, one gun-toting mushroom at a time.

You're expendable, you're paid pennies on the dollar and Saxon is too busy violently suppressing the Galactic Union of Workers to send you reinforcements. That means it's up to you, your robot buddies and your handler Roachard (a talking roach-man) to clean up this problem alone.

Thankfully, every class brings distinct abilities (and personalities) to the battlefield in order to take down the sentient spores.

The most basic FPS character, the Wrangler, is a washed-up cowboy bot with a jump dash and a lasso, which can be used to yank in enemies or grapple out of danger. The Bruiser is an ex-security bot who loves gambling and tanking damage for the team, using his hefty frame to dish out melee retaliation. The Scrapper and Glider are the best team players, creating extra mobility and providing crucial healing for their allies to help them out in a pinch.

You'll want to swap between these classes on the fly in order to adapt to the tasks and parameters of the mission you've picked. You won't be embarking on the same quest every time, after all. Sometimes you're clearing fungus off company property, and other times you're setting up a planetary railgun to blast a rival corporation's spying spaceship out of the air.

The worst missions will have you escorting a vehicle (get ready to repair lots of tires if you're playing solo), but the best missions will see you engaged in an all-out brawl with waves of enemies until you clear out enough of the fungal threat to warrant an extraction.

As with many horde shooters, you get a high degree of control over how difficult your experience will be. There are three modifiers to control how often waves of enemies spawn, and there are six threat levels that determine just how dangerous your foes will be. I found the difficulty curve to be rather generous, and only really got stonewalled around threat level five in my single-player matches.

Unlocking weapon and character upgrades and tagging in your co-op buddies will definitely make threat level six feel like a fair and balanced challenge -- one where you'll face some of the most difficult enemies in the game.

Modular destruction makes every foe feel unique

This fungal contagion is no joke: Every piece of electronic equipment on New Atlas has been taken over by sentient spores, which means lasers and railguns that used to protect the Saxon Corporation's assets are now wielded against you.

Every foe you face is generated with a new combination of nasty tools meant to make your life harder. Basic enemies scuttle toward you with spindly purple fungal legs, stabbing away with wild abandon once they close the distance. While not incredibly powerful by themselves, the spider-like crawlers can quickly overpower you when a horde comes together.

Your biggest problems are the enemies that grow in power from the backline -- fearsome amalgamations of laser beams, bombs, energy weapons and more. As you blow open smaller enemies, larger enemies will steal away their limbs to grow bigger and more powerful, ramping up the threat level even as you thin out the herd.

The enemy AI feels adaptive to evolving combat scenarios, which is impressive for a game of this scope and size. Each enemy will keep their distance from you or press the attack depending on the weapons and tools they've attached to their cores -- I find that it's worth shooting apart limbs even on destroyed enemies so they don't get repurposed as part of a larger squadron of fighters.

There's a constant calculus running through your head while you play Mycopunk: Do you destroy an enemy's core to prevent it from gaining on your position, or do you hack away at its limbs to remove the fungus' resources from the battlefield? Part of what makes the game feel so rewarding is that there's no universally correct answer. You'll have to adapt your destruction to the threats on the field, picking which enemy modules to focus fire on.

The modules your enemies are toting around aren't the only variable that will decide your approach to combat, either. You need to assess each threat based on the weapons (and upgrades) you have access to as well.

Upgrade your character and play your way

If you love perks, weapon attachments and some gaudy gun skins, Mycopunk has tons of customization for you to dive into.

Weapon attachments are found in the field, switching up how your guns and grenades operate. Common drops might net you a long range scope or "kill skills" that let you reload more quickly after defeating an enemy, while rarer pieces of equipment add elemental damage and other more esoteric effects.

Unlocking new modifications for your classes and weapons requires skill points and planetary resources, which you'll earn by leveling up and interacting with local fauna and caches scattered around New Atlas, respectively.

You can also change and improve how your class abilities work. Character skills range from basic ability uptime upgrades to complete overhauls. One of the coolest upgrades for the Bruiser, for instance, changes his barrier forcefield into a dome that provides overhealth for his teammates. I've personally fallen in love with the Scrapper, kitting her out so that I can place her grapple pole more often. There's nothing quite like swinging around missions like I'm wearing one of the Attack on Titan omni-directional mobility kits.

There are dozens of these upgrades that you can unlock in the skill tree or by defeating enemies out during missions, and the rarest offerings will let you completely change how your class and weapons interact with your teammates and the wider world.

Mycopunk feels like the first game that does this particular brand of horde shooting at the same level of quality as Deep Rock Galactic, which is no simple feat.

At its worst -- when a mission crawls at a snail's pace or you just can't get an upgrade that feels like it's worth your time -- the game feels a little unpolished and frustrating. This is to be expected with a developer's first Early Access game, and none of the hiccups are truly obtrusive.

But at its best, Mycopunk is greater than the sum of its parts. It's a game that pulls from so many different shooter subgenres with confidence and competence, and none of its myriad systems feel like a fumbled execution.

It's a game that's dominated by the rule of cool -- you use funky guns to take down insurmountable odds, and sometimes you can even call down a race car just for fun. I'm going to pester my friends to buy the game on launch day, which is probably the most glowing praise I could possibly offer as an FPS fanatic with plenty of other well-established options.

Mycopunk's Early Access release is available for PC on Steam now.

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