With your random character, you’ll navigate around a star system by choosing the path you want to take on an “overworld” map. These traits can either help or hinder you, for example, my first character was a ‘chain smoker’ – so every now and again he’d blurt out a cough, alerting nearby enemies to my location… basically eliminating any chance of me approaching the game stealthily.

In terms of gameplay, you start off with a randomly generated character they’ll have a bunch of stats and most importantly, some personality traits. The story is just one massive tongue in cheek joke – probably one of the few things in 2019 that doesn’t take itself seriously. Obviously, there are hiccups along the way (like a broken printer), requiring you to travel far and wide across the galaxy to various space stations in search of scrap you can use to craft the shit you need. You’re essentially just trying to repair a part of your ship… genuinely, that’s it. In terms of what it is you’re doing, well, not much in the grand scheme of things. All of the characters and locations are an obvious parody of tourism, capitalism and baurocratic society and as a result the humour is quite relevant – even if presented in such a bizarre, abstract way. Void Bastards is set in a fictional galaxy, populated in large by British aliens, robots and other weird shit – but it’s far from serious in its delivery. Anyway, if any of those appeals to you, then there will be something in VB that butters your crumpet – however, the mix of all of those things will leave a bit of a sour taste for some.

With a couple of quintessential 2019 mix-ups thrown in for good measure roguelike elements, proc-gen maps, permadeath, collecting shite – the stuff that gets thrown into anything and everything these days. That is, it’s a comic-book style, cell-shaded first person shooter with the occasional corridor you’re best to just keep your nut down and fucking leg it. Ok, so WTF is Void Bastards and is it for you? Remember XIII? That CLASSIC FPS from Southend Interactive, well, VB is a cross between that and original Doom. Although, it’s not without its issues, as I’ll get into.

Void Bastards is one of those top-notch offerings and is definitely one of my standout games of the year. I cannot believe the sheer amount of quality games that have been added to Xbox’s monthly subscription service – it’s borderline obscene. Before I get into it, can I just start by saying… Xbox fucking Game Pass.

Void bastards enemy numbers