Mycopunk is a slick fungally-infused co-op shooter that’s a fizzy fusion of Helldivers 2 and Risk of Rain

Time to perk up boys and girls. Devolver is touting a new game, which usually means it’s a doozy. It’s called Mycopunk, conjuring up all manner of fungal imagery that’s reflected in a highly-stylised, almost acidic cel-shaded Moebius-like art style. Think the retrofuturism aesthetic of Rollerdrome or even Sable, but more gritty and fizzy. That’d be enough to prompt a peek, but after trying out the demo, I’m fairly confident Devolver has landed another banger.

Mycopunk is a slick co-op shooter that has you play as one of four gun-wielding robot exterminators tasked with cleaning up a planet beset by a nasty mycological outbreak. Known as the New Atlas Hazard Crew, they play and move slightly differently and loosely fall into classes. Glider, well, glides forward in spurts powered by wingsuit jets and can heal allies with a barrage of rockets. Bruiser slams into the ground to stun enemies, playing your typical tank role. Scrapper plops down poles that allies can grapple to while Wrangler’s an acrobatic cowboy with a rocket-powered lasso.

I could chuck in an easy comparison to Helldivers 2, but Mycopunk is doing its own thing not least in the way combat isn’t just mowing through waves. Enemies aren’t your typical fleshy bullet sponges, but rather these limby part-mechanical part-fungal aberrations, their constituent claws, plates, and mechanical seams flying off as you deal damage. It’s more deconstruction than straight destruction. Spidery orbs will rush you. Lumbering hulks with jittery antennae spew laser beams your way. They also have weak points, introducing a certain strategy to the messy and chaotic nature of fights. More interestingly, anything you shear off an enemy could be picked up by another and used against you.

Whether you tick off objectives or die early, each mission gets your resources and inches the level gauge further forward, letting you invest in wacky upgrades for both guns and character abilities. Styled as a DNA-like grid, the upgrade tree hints at strings of modifiers, effects, and synergies that are ‘hyper-customisable’ per the official blurb. Successive missions get a little easier as a consequence, ingraining a measured sense of progression that’s the moreish lure of any good repetitive co-op shooter.

Aside from the joy of gunning down enemies, what really stands out is Mycopunk’s mood and flavour. Your crew periodically spits out suitably obnoxious off-the-cuff comments. The hub spaceship overflows with contraptions and curios to toy with before assembling your crew and starting a mission. Roach milk festers in the corner. The ship is captained by a mouthy little cockroach named Roachard more than happy to showcase their rich lexicon of obscenities when you shoot them. And, again, the fizzy and acidic art is just plain neat.

Mycopunk doesn’t take itself too seriously. What you see is what you get, a rather refreshing no-nonsense take on the co-op shooter, but without sacrificing the loadout tinkering and upgrade tweaking that’s a mainstay of the genre. As a measure of just how fun and playable Mycopunk is, first-person shooters – co-op or otherwise – aren’t usually my bag but I’m keen to play more. Mycopunk is doing its own thing and is unusually assured for a indie debut, this one coming from the nascent Pigeons at Play. With Devolver clearly aware of the potential here, Mycopunk is slated for release sometime in 2025.