Do you love FTL: Faster Than Light? What about Warhammer: 40,000? Well, combine those two things and you get Void War, a pixelated space-faring roguelike that's very heavily leaning into its inspirations.
I absolutely adore FTL. It's my Steam game with the most hours pumped into it by far. It never got a sequel though. Instead, developer Subset Games moved onto Into The Breach, which is still good, but it just doesn't give me the same je ne sais quois. I played the free Void War demo and am happy to report back it's basically just FTL with a Warhammer 40K vibe.
Now, it might not be quite as good as FTL, but that still makes it a pretty fun game to play. Just like FTL, Void War sees you taking your ship through various space nodes and fighting a galactic war. There are subsystems that you have to assign power to, various weapons you can equip to your ship, and each node you visit has a random event. It could be good, like some free scrap you can use to upgrade your reactor, or bad, like an ambush.
Unfortunately, Void War doesn't have some of the quality of life features FTL does, like clearly displayed shortcuts for assigning subsystem power, and it's also a lot easier than FTL ever was.
Where the Warhammer 40K comparison comes in is with the story and overall aesthetic of the game. While the HUD and gameplay are essentially copies of FTL, the whole vibe of the game is decidedly Warhammer. There's a dying Imperial empire, a fallen God-King, and several cults that exist throughout the star systems. If you think that sounds like Warhammer's Imperium, God-Emperor, and cults of the Chaos Gods, you'd be right.
There are also mechanical units called Husks, which are "crudely built servants made of flesh and steel," whose "brainstem has been surgically altered for reliability and ease of maintenance." These are just Servitors from 40K. The spaceships you pilot are also described as ancient, just like all the Imperium's technology. It's all dripping with that grim-dark sci-fi style.
All in all, it's a decent little game, and I'm excited for the full thing to come out in Q2 of 2025 – that's sometime between April and June. It may not be quite as good, but Void War feels like the closest thing we'll ever get to an FTL sequel. Check it out on Steam, right here.
While you're here, you should check out all the must-play indies of 2024 that you may have missed out on.
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