Skylanders in Space Finally Clicks G Trends

Skylanders in Space Finally Clicks

I’ve been following Voidling Bound for almost a year. I previewed it from that DNA splicing reveal, had a good time arguing with my own TikTok comments about whether it was “Spore meets Pokemon” or, as one pointed viewer insisted, “Spore meets Warframe”, and dug into it all in my Is Voidling Bound Really Like Spore? functionality. Through it all, my Xbox-owning audience kept asking the same thing: When will we actually be able to play it? The PC version has been available since June 9, I spent quite a bit of time on it and I’m happy to report that the wait was worth it. It’s Skylanders in space, without the plastic, and I really enjoyed it.

What is Voidling Bound?

For all those who arrive fresh, a little summary. Voidling Bound is the first game from Hatchery Games, a Canadian studio founded by former Skylanders developers, and that pedigree is printed all over it. You play as a faceless Space Wrangler aboard a starship, using neural transfer technology to bond with and take direct control of creatures called Voidlings on the surfaces of corrupted planets. Earth and its neighbors are consumed by a spreading alien plague, and the Voidlings are humanity’s response.

In practice, they are two games linked together. On the ship, you manage everything: upgrade stations, an incubator for hatching eggs, a breeding enclosure, and a sanctuary where your collected creatures roam and, adorably, fall asleep from time to time. On planets, it becomes a fast-paced third-person action game, where you clean up purple corruption, blow up alien robots, and scour every corner for research points and elemental mutagens. It’s a shooter and creature collection RPG, which is very hyphenated, but it works.

Creatures wear it

The Voidlings are the reason for being here. The art style is bright, confident, and full of character, and the eight species are a joy to collect, from the jellyfish-like Nimiod to the Gremlins-inspired Gwigoon and the bird-like Kwipeck you start with. Each plays as a class rather than a reskin. The Kwipeck fires rapid shots from a distance like an assault rifle, the Glick (which I affectionately call my shotgun dog) reaches for your opponent’s face, and the melee-only Ur-Sek hits like a truck. Watching them change shape and color as they evolve on their branching paths never gets old, and with 248 evolutions to pursue, there’s always another form to unlock.

A fight that lets you be the monster

Where most creature collectors expect you to turn-based combat, Voidling Bound puts you inside the creature. Third-person combat is fast and responsive, built around a primary attack, a secondary, a buff or debuff, and an ultimate that you charge up, with cooldowns to juggle in the style of an action-RPG like Diablo. It also works wonderfully, which is what counts. Landing on a planet is smooth and the moment-to-moment combat is always satisfying.

The real depth, however, lies in the three creature creation systems we pointed out in the overview: hatching, reproduction, and DNA splicing. Eggs hatch into random creatures, breeding lets you get better stats, and splicing lets you graft mutations from any species onto your favorite. Once the splice is opened, the game flourishes. You can build a Voidling to your exact liking, stacking abilities and buffs in combinations that border on unfair, and coming across a truly broken build is one of the great pleasures of the game. It’s easily the best creature build I’ve played in years.

Where it fails

I loved my time with Voidling Bound, but a positive review should always be honest, and there are some rough edges. Most importantly, I just wanted more. There are four main zones, three planets and the Abyss, and I completed the campaign credits in about eleven hours. The endgame, a vague risk-reward mode called Void Strikes, is fun but repetitive once the novelty wears off.

The presentation shows his independent budget in a few places. There’s no voice acting, so conversations with your team land a little flat, and the story of fighting an unnamed purple corruption is thin and forgettable. The balance is also uneven. Once I built a plasma Nimiod that flattened everything, my carefully assembled team mostly gathered dust, and the training room that levels a Voidling to the ceiling in minutes makes an already mild challenge even sweeter. The enemy designs, all robots and blocky crystals, never match the imaginations of the Voidlings facing them.

None of these are deal-breakers. These are the kinds of problems that come from a game with a brilliant core that simply needs to be filled out, and I’d happily take a few drops of content to get there.

The Xbox Question

The only thing my regular readers will want to know: this is still a PC version, on Steam and the Epic Games Store, for now. Hatchery Games has confirmed console versions for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and Switch 2 at a later date, but there is no firm date yet. I played on PC, and if you’re on Xbox, this is a game to add and keep an eye on. It’s worth the wait.

The verdict

Voidling Bound is a whimsical alien zoo with a superb creature creation engine and genuinely more action-intensive action at its core, held back only by a lack of content and a few missing production touches. As the first game from a young studio, it’s an extremely promising foundation, and as a love letter to anyone who grew up on Skylanders, Pokemon, or Monster Rancher, it hits the mark. I wish Hatchery Games would build on this, and in the meantime I had a great time petting the aliens. You will too.

Rating: 8.3/10

Benefits : Magnificent creatures full of character; a deep and enriching evolution-race-splicing creation; fast, satisfying combat that plays out really well; easy to pick up.

Disadvantages: The campaign seems short; no voice acting and a forgettable story; undercooked balance and team systems; annoying enemy designs.