Void Crew Review:
Cloned Chaos With Friends

Most video games are created around a simple concept: challenging their player base while keeping the challenge fun. It’s a simple concept that’s incredibly hard to execute, and even harder to maintain over long periods of time. It’s why when a video game grabs your attention and demands mastery, it can be so addictive and compelling. It’s why the Dark Souls games are so beloved; they found a group of people who enjoy having to truly learn an experience, who want to feel like they are tackling an insurmountable problem.

I strongly believe that everyone has a video game that’s been crafted to challenge them in a way that clicks. For some, it is the classic adventure game like Dark Souls. For others who love to build, it’s going to be a game like Minecraft or Stardew Valley or Satisfactory. For goodness sakes, I know too many people who have been consumed by the ‘just one more run’ of a card roguelike such as Slay The Spire and now Balatro.

All of this is to say that when I bought Void Crew, I was expecting a fun multiplayer experience, but I wasn’t expecting it to hook me. I wasn’t expecting it to reach inside my brain and scratch an itch I didn’t even realize that I had. “This,” Void Crew said. “This is the multiplayer experience you’ve wanted for years”.

This is a review of a game that feels like it was made for me, and a way for me to justify why I immediately bought it as a holiday gift for at least ten friends.

Clones. In. Space!

First off, what is Void Crew? Simply put, you and up to three friends are clones - more specifically, people piloting disposable clones called ‘Ectypes’ - who are sent off on practical suicide missions on a frigate or destroyer class starship. Your ship is well built, but initial armaments are sparse. The game hints early on that humanity is… not doing well in this future.

You are sent out into space, set up your ship, divide up responsibilities, and then choose an objective from a randomized selection: scavenging supplies, protecting a transport, blowing up a strike force… all the classics are here. Complete your objective, gather whatever scrap you can to upgrade your ship, and jump out of the sector before the enemy overwhelms you. Rinse and repeat until you decide you have to go back home, survive enough objectives to go after a boss, or blow up in the attempt.

Very clear cut. Nice and straight forward.

Only Two Hands And Ten Things To Do (The First Few Runs)

The complications to your success come in several forms. The first is obvious: this is a roguelike game. Yes, you get to choose your starting ship layout (do you want risky kinetic weapons that require ammo, or more reliable energy weapons that drain ship power?), but then you have to build with what you can find during a run. This also means that sometimes, if you really want a particular relic or weapon blueprint, you might have to take a mission that’s a higher difficulty than you would like. Choices like that abound, and anyone who’s played roguelikes will understand the format almost immediately.

The more interesting problems come from how gameplay is structured. Void Crew is a game with a first person camera, but is expecting you to run a ship like you would in a game like Faster Than Light or any game where you are in charge of a whole crew with a bird’s eye view. To shoot the guns, you need to, well, run up to a gunner’s chair and step inside. If you need to go collect resources from a derelict base, you need to go to the airlock, suit up, depressurize the airlock, and head outside. If you are inside the ship, the only way you get a full third person view of the ship and your surroundings is by being in the pilot’s chair.

Suddenly, every small issue becomes one that can create panic. Ship damage of course shows up as hit point damage, but it also manifests in engine degradation, electrical fires, and power failure. Actual hit point repair can only truly come from exiting the ship’s airlock and patching the hull, something that is… difficult to do if you have any enemies around.

In most video games involving spacecraft, doing something like repairing the ship or building an upgrade is a simple click of a button, and the process goes on in the background as you keep enjoying the action. In Void Crew, most of these actions are more labor heavy and cumbersome. That’s the point. In fact, that’s somehow what makes the game fun.

Multiplayer That Makes Everyone Matter

My first run in this game was done with a good friend of mine. We took the frigate, a ship which is meant for just 2-3 people. You can run from one end to the other in less than 10 seconds, and it's a pretty open floor plan. After 30 hours of gameplay, it makes me laugh to remember how absolutely overwhelmed we were. A small sampling of the sentences we shared in voice chat:

• “Wait, we don’t have enough power to run the guns and the shields. Are we doing something wrong?”
• “What do you mean we have to manually charge the ship thrusters?”
• “I have to repair the ship - Wyatt wait STOP THE SHIP.”
• “Quick, shoot that big ship behind us!” “Which one?!”

Making the friction of running a space-faring vessel intentionally worse adds chaos in both predictable and entirely surprising ways. The first time you feel something hit the ship and you aren’t the pilot is a revelation, as it’s very unnerving to feel your whole world shake, see your ship health drop by 10-20%, and have to shout “What the Hell was that?!” because if you weren’t looking out a window, you couldn’t see the proximity mine cluster that nearly just took you out. Meanwhile, being glued to the pilot seat makes you feel powerful and helpless, as you can’t help fire any ship guns yourself or try and help poor Eric apply a repair patch to the ship. If you try to get up from that chair in the middle of a firefight though to help out your crew however… heaven have mercy.

As you gain experience and level up your Ectype, you have four different skill trees that you can level up between missions. It’s a good guideline for what basic ‘roles’ you will be inhabiting:

• Pilot. The most straightforward role, and maybe the most demanding. If you are the pilot, you won’t be leaving that seat often. Not just because you drive the ship, but because it’s the only place you get a 3rd person view of the area around the ship. Also, marking targets so you can call them out and coordinate the crew? Priceless.
• Gunner. Point the gun at the enemy, take the shot; it really is that simple. However, Each area of the ship can have different guns installed, and you have to coordinate with the pilot to get clear shots. Are you using the right ranged weapon? Have you made sure there’s enough energy or ammo to keep reliably firing?
• Engineer. This is the ship’s gopher, the one that has to run around the inside of the ship and take note of the little things that start going wrong. As the ship takes damage, they are the one who keeps checking the engine room for damage, puts out fires, and recharging the ship’s thrusters. It’s like a stagehand for theatre: they seem forgettable, but if they aren’t there, things can go wrong quickly.
• Scavenger. This role seems the most niche, but when it shines, it really shines. They get an energy grappling hook to fly around faster and it’s incredibly useful for going outside the ship. Having someone who can move faster in space and delve into abandoned space stations helps missions complete quicker, which is very important when things start going wrong.

These are the four basic roles you fall into during a run. Yes, anyone can run up and grab a gun turret to help out in a firefight, but having someone as a dedicated gunner on your most upgraded weapon is best for everyone. In fact, some guns get better by having power cells attached or require ammo: having someone on the ship looking out for this to replace cells or ammunition is something you don’t think about until suddenly it’s a problem.

The pilot is the most obvious role, the one that usually gets stuck in the chair at the front of the ship. In nearly all games I’ve played, the pilot also ends up as the de facto captain, using their better viewpoint and info display to call out what needs to happen next. And marking enemies? You don’t realize how much you need that until you are in a dogfight with 20 different enemies. I’ve gone hoarse during extended runs calling out things such as “Bravo on left side of ship, 400 meters, priority - Charlie coming on right, 700 meters, charging up an attack switch SWITCH SWITCH!” Guns are great, but again, with so many enemies if everyone isn’t prioritizing constantly, you will be overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, the scavenger role is a dark horse. They often end up helping out the gunner or the engineer, but when there’s something to do off ship, their ability to grapple around makes them a superhero. Normally leaving the ship with a jetpack is very limited by oxygen, but a scavenger with upgrades can investigate a wreck or repair a space station solo. You can actually leave them there for minutes to get work done while you fight off waves of enemies. It happens very rarely, but those sweet moments when you find a station gun? Suddenly having a second source of firepower to take on the foe is glorious, the scavenger picking off enemy after enemy.

Before, I talked about the frigate, a simple vessel with a wide open plan. Now, take all the coordination I spoke about and apply it to the destroyer class ship, a vehicle with long hallways, two different airlocks, and multiple floors from the ship bridge to the engine room. My first few runs with anyone involve them getting lost at least once. Yes, it’s not that complicated, but as you feel the ship shake from impact and have two different players in your ear shouting about the engine being on fire and requiring more ammo? Panic, true panic, can set in.

When things go wrong in Void Crew, when your friends are all giving 110% just to get the mission done while also keeping your ship in the air, each of you wishing you could be in two places at once… it’s a magical moment. That moment you manage to escape with a warp jump at the very last moment before destruction, or when you see a perfectly executed plan let you tear apart an enemy fleet without taking any damage? Perfection.

The Joy Of Roguelike Mastery (When You Start Getting It Right)

Your first five to ten runs in this game are going to be short. Again, Void Crew just has a different cadence and rhythm that takes time to get used to. One player can’t carry the team, everyone has to be putting in effort to keep the ship running smoothly. I remember being ecstatic when I survived two objectives in a row instead of just completing one and then escaping back to base with a wrecked ship! We were cheering in audio chat, absolutely pleased with ourselves.

Then, as with many well made games, there’s an odd thing that happens. You get your first few skill points, and with just a few levels you feel your competency not just improve, but double or triple. You get used to the flow of combat, the flow of how each style of objective should work. Your team learns when to engage the enemy and when to try and escape. You start surviving multiple objectives in a row with your ship keeping most of its hull intact.

You survive long enough to start risking the ‘hard’ or ‘insane’ listed objectives to try and get better gear. You survive long enough to see your weapons upgrade to the next tier, and a whole new world opens up to you. Sure, maybe you get killed a bunch while experimenting with weapon mods or the order in which you upgrade your ship, but Void Crew has its teeth in you now. The urge to improve, to get better, to get just that little bit farther sets in. If you’ve ever said to yourself ‘just one more run’ playing a card roguelike, that’s exactly what you get here, except it’s a whole team saying it, wanting to get just that much farther into the void.

You run into a boss for the first time and die. So you get more efficient. You and your friends now have dedicated roles, you come up with your own ways to communicate information you need quickly. You retool your talent trees and start getting upgraded equipment unlocked for your ship, you refine your strategy so that you can get to the boss with as many alloys saved up as possible for the best upgrades you can get for your ship.

After about fifteen runs, we came up with the winning formula for my crew. My good friend who we’ll call ‘The Texan’ leaned into his upbringing, and our entire goal during missions was to speedrun giving him the highest tier energy sniper gun we possibly could. We’d take on any mission no matter the difficulty to unlock relics which gave us higher damage percentages to our weapons when we purposefully ruined our own circuit breakers. Our engineer spending their time juggling energy cells to recharge for the main gun, recharging the ship thrusters, and carefully, carefully making sure we threw just enough breakers for damage without making our ship short circuit.

By our twenty-fifth run, we didn’t feel like timid clones hoping not to die immediately, but like warrior demigods of space combat. The recuser beamcaster starts off with a strong 3,000 points of damage per shot. After salvaging and scrapping our way through battlefields, the highest we’ve been able to stack the bonuses have brought it up past 47,000 per shot. Suddenly, mid-tier enemies like frigates and bombers die in just one or two shots. Our engineer and scavengers, manning energy gatling guns on the sides, would clear out the chaff as The Texan obliterated anything we called their attention to. Between objectives, he’d sometimes tell us he’d go to get another beer, and we’d be off again, his accuracy with that sniper perfect.

One of the last runs I finished in Void Crew didn’t see us just defeat one boss, but three. We didn’t end the run for over an hour, enduring through three full zones just to see if we could. The laughter I heard as we saw how much experience we got from just that one run made me grin ear to ear as all of us realized we hadn’t just worked well as a team, but we had mastered the game itself.

When The Battle-Thrill Wears Thin

Alas, this sense of victory and mastery, is one of Void Crew’s best traits, but also what might keep it from becoming a classic as it currently stands. Personally, I have found that the multiplayer experiences I’ve had in Void Crew are some of the best I’ve had playing a video game. It feels so good as each of you has to work together, but become really good in entirely different roles. Playing this game as a pilot feels incredibly different than as an engineer, and I trust my much more detail oriented friends to really perfect keeping the ship in tip top shape… and god forbid I ever try to hold a candle to The Texan in a gunner role.

However, once you hit mastery… that’s just it. You’ve mastered it. In early december, I bought this game as a holiday gift for many friends, and I played it relentlessly for weeks. Our discord server echoed with people wanting to do a run nearly every single night. Then, we figured out the game. Play with The Texan, give The Texan a recuser beamcaster, and delete everything in front of us. Defeating a boss wasn’t a question, it was how many. We didn’t need to experiment anymore: we had a solution, and it was a solution that worked on every obstacle we came across.

I went from putting in nearly 35 hours into the game last december to only playing once in 2025. After a giddy few weeks getting achievements and unlocking holiday themed cosmetics, the religious fervor to play more and more simply stopped.

The core game experience is phenomenal, but after maybe 15-20 hours you can really see the cracks and need for more variety. If you can’t tell, I’m a huge fan of this game, so to force myself to get to the point instead of ramble, I’m going to make a quick list of some of the weak spots in Void Crew:

• Variety of missions: This is the most straight forward. There are 9 types of missions, but most missions boil down to destroying enemies before they call for back up or create more ships, or landing to collect something from an old station. Adding more mission types would go a long way, or maybe just adding more variety to each type already there.
• Variety of weapons and mods: This one is already being worked on, and is probably the easiest. Adding different ways to take down your foe would be huge, as right now its too easy to come up with the ‘best’ build. Adding more types of weapons and prizes you run into would promote more creativity!
• Variety of enemies: Right now you have the Hollow and the Remnant, with The Hollow as your main AI style swarming enemy, with the Remnant having a more human heavy-firepower-frigate sort of approach. While The Hollow have a pretty good spread of foes, Giving the Remnant more ship types would be great. Even better, adding a third enemy type all together would be huge for making runs feel different.
• Wonky Difficulty: This one is being worked on right now as well, but experienced players have learned to game the system. Some mission types are just easier than others, whether they are marked as hard, normal, or insane. It can make it feel overwhelming for new players and easier to do difficult fights that are actually easier for others.
• Music: I really like the music in this game… when it plays. There’s long stretches where there’s no music at all, then suddenly a great moment as “Wrath of the Hollow” kicks on as enemies engage, but it fades as quickly as it arrived. It’s pretty good synth music, I want more mood to go with the game!
• Skill Tree Balancing: Like a lot of games with skill trees, this needs some detail work. Some skills feel very limited or underpowered while others are absolute monsters that make the class feel worth it but only at the end of the tree (looking at you, Engineer and Scavenger!).
• I need more lore! This is a nitpick in comparison to the others, but I really like the world they started to set up here. Humanity on the run from AI, trying to find ‘the garden’ outside of the galaxy, how humanity is only alive because they follow Metem, the way to transfer yourself between clones… I’d kill for story events, for more context. Yes, there are some lore drives you can find during runs, but I’d love more serious info at the hub between runs.
• More Ship Types: This is more of a dream, as this would be a ton of work… but I would love for there to be more ship hulls to drive. I can’t imagine how wild it would get to run an even bigger ship with what, 6-8 people? Or maybe two frigates being operated at the same time by a team? Again, the base of Void Crew is so solid, it just needs more content and variety and ways to interact.

One negative I don’t entirely agree with is that the Engineer and the Scavenger are boring, especially the Engineer. The argument is that the class boils down to a lot of ‘press x to fix this’. It is partially true, as the Engineer is relegated to sort of picking up the odds and ends of the ship. When everything is going smoothly, it can feel boring and very one note. As runs go on however and you have more installed guns, power, and mods to manipulate, your job becomes invaluable. Trust me, my poor friends who have to fix my entire ship as we drive through minefields while The Texan constantly needs energy cell reloads are not bored. But yes, making these classes feel more active would be great. Adding more station guns and out-of-ship objectives would be great for the scavenger, and the engineer tree having more active style skills would really help.

There are a lot of negatives listed here because I have so many positives. This game grabbed me, hook, line, and sinker, and didn’t let go for a month. Void Crew is phenomenal. I think that if you have friends to play it with, the sheer amount of fun you will get out of just a few runs is worth the $25 dollars to buy the game. Again, I have about 35-40 hours put into this game and absolutely adored it during that time. But for many who enjoy roguelikes, who enjoy having a good multiplayer game to constantly come back to, they want an everflowing font of options and variety… that just hasn’t arrived yet.

Fortunately, most of the issues listed are just a matter of needing more content, and there’s already a lot on the way. Any week now the devs are putting in a huge patch which is focused on rebalancing the initial difficulty curve, adding more emotes for players to use, and adding mutators for different experiences during runs. Most excitedly, they are adding a way to create payloads - everything from mine clusters to torpedoes or lures - that you can launch from a dedicated module or have some crew member with a death wish hang on outside the ship and chuck it by hand.

…I can think of at least a few of my friends who will play this again just for a chance to hurl a warhead with their hands, actually.

Void Crew Is An Amazing Experience - Your Obsession May Vary

Void Crew is a fantastic game. It’s given me a lot of laughs and a lot of triumphant shouting with friends. I love how it forces multiplayer interactivity in a way that feels special, and I enjoy how it merges some elements of simulation in with a much more action oriented genre. Again, it is only $25 at full price, and I more than got my fair share of hours out of it already.

Out of the 8-to-10 friends I’ve played this game with, everyone enjoyed it. Some really appreciated the novel approach, but were okay stepping back and waiting for more content after 5-10 runs, while others were hooked like me, and have wracked up 20-30 hours. My review isn’t asking if Void Crew is a good game, but trying to help figure out if it’s a good game for you. I know there is a way to play solo with AI powered gun platforms - and it plays just fine! - but that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to shout at one friend that I need more power to the engines while The Texan bellows at me to turn the ship around to get clear shots.

If Void Crew keeps adding new enemies, new weapons, and new options, it’s a game that I’ll keep coming back to, and a game I’ll keep recommending to everyone I know. Whether you become obsessed like me or find it a fun game for a month, I hope you enjoy it. Metem preserve us all while we wait for the next patch, and I get hooked for a week or two all over again.