Mycopunk: put a deflector shield on a chainsaw, the studio does not care

There is a line in Mycopunk's description that made me buy the game before I had finished reading it.

After listing what you can do with your robot, the studio concludes: spec into being a healing support, put a deflector shield on a chainsaw, or turn yourself into a bomb. We don't really care.

A studio that writes "we don't really care" on its store page is a studio that understands build freedom cannot be declared, it has to be proved by letting people do something idiotic.

The situation

A ragtag squad of robot rejects is hired by the SAXON corporation and given one last shot at profitable glory, which incidentally avoids the scrap heap.

They are the New Atlas Hazard Crew, a ramshackle team of exterminators sent to uncover what lies behind a planet-wide fungal catastrophe.

Is this really a simple natural disaster, as they claim? And did SAXON genuinely misfile your taxes, or was that your own fault?

The game has been in early access since July 2025, it shows 4,225 positive reviews out of 4,780, or 88 per cent, and it goes 1.0 tomorrow, at 14.99 euros.

The grid, and that is the real subject

Everybody compares Mycopunk to Deep Rock Galactic, and players themselves cite Risk of Rain. That is fair on atmosphere, but it misses the point.

What Mycopunk has that the others do not is a grid-based upgrade system.

Every mission earns you mods to jam into the grids of your weapons and your robot. Those mods have shapes. You have a limited surface. And whatever you manage to fit in is fair game.

Read that last phrase again: whatever fits is fair game. There is no compatibility rule, no reserved category, no minimum level. The only arbiter is geometry.

That is Tetris inventory applied to character building, and it is an excellent decision, because it turns a question of statistics into a spatial problem. You do not ask whether this mod is good. You ask whether it fits.

One player does point at the current limitation: you cannot yet rotate the rarer mods to slot more in. That is exactly the sort of detail a 1.0 should sort out, and it is telling that the complaint is about rotating pieces rather than about balance.

The organism

The other strong idea concerns the enemies, and one player describes it far better than the store page.

He explains the game did not win him over immediately: some guns, some missions, and rather boring enemies that just charge you. Then, after about two and a half hours, it clicks. The fights get more chaotic, the enemies more numerous and bigger.

And that is when he discovers what makes the game special: the enemy organism behaves like an organism.

The game puts it differently: you pick the crawlies apart piece by piece, but be wary, whatever they drop could be grabbed up by another one. The enemies corrupt and weaponise the planet's technology against you.

In other words, the horde is not a queue of enemies, it is an ecosystem that recycles its own debris. Dismembering becomes a tactical decision rather than a visual effect.

The complaints, and they are serious

88 per cent positive, but the remaining 12 per cent say specific things a 1.0 needs to hear.

It is too chaotic at the start. A player with one hour writes that he is not even sure what he is supposed to be doing, that the game throws too much at him at once, and that it is a big mess. Another, otherwise enthusiastic, describes a game where you have to figure everything out yourself, with menus and a hub that are hard to understand.

The pattern is consistent: the first two hours are hostile, and several players who love the game note that they did not enjoy their first hour.

Solo is the weak point. That is the best-argued complaint. A player with fourteen hours explains that it is impossible to enjoy alone: enemies are incredibly accurate even at long range, some attacks delete your entire health bar, and fighting the larger creatures is sluggish.

And he points at the genre's real problem: the game is designed as a co-op shooter, but the population is modest, so you mostly end up playing by yourself. Fifty-nine players online as I write, the day before 1.0.

That is the classic vicious circle, and the 1.0 release is precisely the chance to break it.

Enemy accuracy. Several players judge it unreasonable, with targeting lasers and missiles one player describes, not without humour, as better than real guidance systems.

And crashes. One player reports four hard freezes of his machine in three hours, three of them in standard mode. He notes his setup clears the minimum specs and hopes the 1.0 fixes it.

What the ones who stay say

And this is the decisive argument.

A player with eighty-six hours, arriving from hundreds of hours in Risk of Rain 1, Risk of Rain 2 and Deep Rock Galactic, writes that he initially thought this game would have little to offer him. He was wrong. He describes it as an extremely fresh take, improving on existing systems, and built for longer replayability than the three titles he names.

Eighty-six hours from somebody who knows the genre inside out is worth more than an enthusiastic review at two hours.

So, tomorrow

The 1.0 arrives with a game that has already found its audience and knows exactly what it is criticised for.

If the studio uses this release to soften the first hour, allow mod rotation, and sort out enemy accuracy in solo, Mycopunk has everything it needs to become the winter's co-op shooter.

If it merely removes the label, it will remain a very good game that a lot of people abandon before hour two.

In the meantime, the advice I can give you is the one players give each other: hold on until the second hour. That is when it opens up. And we have written a guide to getting there.

Built something absurd that works? That is this game's reason for existing, show it on the InsertCoins Discord.