Void War, an upcoming indie game from two-person studio Tundra, is going to make a very specific audience extremely happy. If you’ve ever played the space faring roguelite FTL: Faster Than Light, and thought “Man, I wish this was set in the Warhammer 40k universe”, then Void War is a title you need to watch.
To be clear here, Void War isn’t an officially licensed Warhammer 40k game, and it takes place in a legally distinct “dark, techno-gothic galaxy on the brink of collapse”. According to the FAQ in the game’s Discord server, it’s “a new setting built from scratch” that “allows for tight coupling between gameplay mechanics and lore”.
But Warhammer 40k fans will find it very familiar. The game puts you in the captain’s throne of an ancient void ship, travelling towards the heart of a decaying empire, while “ruinous cults sweep through the stars”. And as the devs say the game is moddable and have plans to support modding properly, we don’t expect it will be too long before eager fans add the Warhammer 40k factions and Space Marine chapters into the game.
The gameplay is… well, it’s pretty much the same as FTL. If you’re not familiar with FTL it’s a mixture of real-time tactics with roguelite progression. During battles the different parts of your ship will take damage individually, causing systems to fail, fires to start, oxygen to vent into space, and crew-members to die.
Your choices during battle – assigning crew to different stations, sending power to and from different systems, locking and unlocking doors, targeting your weapon systems – may make the difference between a glorious victory or a gruelling defeat.
Between fights you’ll navigate the stars, moving from encounter to encounter. As well as fights there are choose-your-own-adventure style decisions, which might grant you new technology, new crew-members, or cause terrible damage to your ship. There’s every chance that you’ll die horribly in the void of space before ever reaching the end of your journey – but there’s always another run.
An alpha version of Void War is available on Itch.io already, which advertises “a heaping pile of content” that should last 25-30 hours for experienced players and much longer for genre newcomers. However, be advised that there will be bugs, crashes, and profile resets as updates are released. There are twelve levels of “torment difficulty” for those particularly masochistic players who want to grind out every last drop.
Wargamer hasn’t tested this yet, but we’d like to. We’ve sunk in quite a lot of time to FTL over the years, and our passion for Warhammer 40k is known. The only concern is that we have put in rather too much time to FTL, if we’re honest, and we have other responsibilities…
If you want to command an official Warhammer 40k voidship in a videogame, Battlefleet Gothic 2 or Rogue Trader are your best bet. If you’re interested in videogames that will keep you coming back time after time, our guides to the best 4X games and best games like XCOM are full of titles that will leave you saying “one more turn” for far longer than just one more turn.
Source: Wargamer
