If you were to take the roguelike, starship-commanding gameplay of FTL, hurl it through a warp portal into a galaxy as nightmarishly grimdark as Warhammer 40,000, you would probably end up with the indie game Void War. I previewed a beta build just before the game launched in late 2024 and found that not only was it good, it was so damn addictive I had to uninstall it for my own safety. So when indie developer Tundra informed me that the game was about to get its 20th numbered update on August 11, I had two thoughts: “sign me the hell up” and “this could be a problem”.
I’ve reinstalled it, started prodding at the new content, and oh hell it’s as good as ever. Void War isn’t a direct clone of either FTL or Warhammer 40k, but it is a very near relative of both, and if you’re familiar with either the game or the setting you’ll find a lot to love here.
Like FTL, you take control of a starship depicted in plan view, with each ship system located in a specific room, and your crew scurrying around like pixelated ants. When an enemy comes on screen you’ll need to route power to different systems, task your teeny crew with squeezing more efficiency from their stations, making repairs, and fending off boarders, while you target different parts of the enemy vessel with your own guns to bring them down.
Combats and other events are strung into roguelike runs that see you hopping from node to node. You’ll explore ever more dangerous star systems, recruit new crew, potentially pledge yourself to one strange faction or another, and make your ship as lethal as possible with a variety of power-hungry upgrades from lance weapons to summoning circles.
The setting is Walmart Warhammer 40k. The galactic Emperor has fallen and everyone hates you, from the zealous Imperialis to the profane cults of Blood, War, and Death. You don’t have to squint hard to work out which Warhammer 40k factions each force is riffing on, but they have enough personality (or lack of one, in the case of the Technocult) that they still feel distinct. You can hire just about anything you can fight in the game, letting you recruit death witches and technocult savants alongside more mundane Imperial enforcers and pirate scavengers.
Crew combat is a massive part of the game in a way that it simply isn’t in FTL. Ship shields can’t block the psychic powers of a coven of psychics, or prevent your elite shock troops from smashing through the hull in a boarding sled. It’s a distinct way to build your ship with its own tactics. Ships often contain delicious loot crates that you can only retrieve if you wipe out the enemy crew without destroying their ship, so there’s an incentive – but possessed vessels can operate without crew or oxygen, so it has definite weaknesses.
With a 1.0 launch and twenty content updates since I last played the game, there’s loads here I don’t recognise. The ‘Space Defense Force’ update, released on Tuesday, adds the 30th starting ship chassis to the game, the Starfoil, with a loadout focused on stunning the enemy crew. It belongs to rogue crew from the Space Defense Force, genetically altered post-humans from a mysterious exo-culture. They show up a lot in the ‘Prosperine Jewel Worlds’, a recently added new star sector type, full of maiden worlds untouched by the Imperium and packed with secrets and dangers.
Then there are Planetary Assaults, a new kind of combat encounter added in January this year. While planetary installations have (almost) all the same systems as a spaceship, they can’t be destroyed outright: your mission is simply to get troops inside and claim all the loot you can before you take so much damage the operation is unprofitable. These missions are designed to reward players who spec towards using their crews aggressively – teleporters, boarding sleds, and summoners are all very useful.
It’s the biggest variation from the core gameplay that I’ve encountered so far, but I think it’s not quite there; without the threat of the enemy ship jumping away or blowing up with your boarders still inside, there’s not enough tension. The system is still being iterated on with new content; the latest update adds new planetside encounters that occur in ancient temples and burial sites which I still haven’t seen yet.
Void War’s moment to moment combat is compelling, but it’s the roguelike loop that makes me hopelessly unable to resist one more encounter… one more sector… one more run. The event variety was fine when I last played and it’s only grown since then. The snippets of storytelling are evocative: receiving a multi-sector quest from an extradimensional horror in the form of a black psychic pearl that communicated the destination directly into my captain’s brain was particularly memorable.
I haven’t detected any truly transformational changes to Void War since it launched, but there’s more of it, and it launched in a state so dangerously morish that I didn’t trust myself to keep it on my computer. I’m really glad that it’s found enough of an audience for Tundra to give it dedicated ongoing support. The game does have its own identity – but if it had the official license, it would be one of the best Warhammer 40k games on the market.
I heartily recommend you try out the free demo to try on Steam, and let me know what you think of it in the official Wargamer Discord community!
Source: Wargamer
