VoidFall: an enormous talent tree sitting on scenery that is not finished

First things first, to save you half an hour of confusion: this VoidFall has nothing to do with the other one.

There is a famous Voidfall, a heavy 4X board game by Mindclash Games, cerebral, beloved by people who find Terraforming Mars shallow. If you arrived here looking for its adaptation, this is not it.

This one is a third-person wave survivor by Voidfall Studios, out today.

What is good, and there is some

I am starting here because this is the part that kept me around longer than expected.

The talent tree is enormous. A radial wheel of roughly a hundred and fifty nodes, arranged in concentric rings around a centre, with a search function because obviously one was needed. For a wave survivor, that is far more ambitious than the genre norm.

And more importantly, the upgrade draft has a ban button.

That deserves a pause, because it is a genuinely good and under-known idea. On each level up you are offered three cards. You can reroll one. But you can also ban it, meaning remove it permanently from the draft for the rest of the run.

In a game where chance decides your build, being able to delete the noise is an extremely satisfying piece of control. You are not only choosing what you take, you are choosing what the game is allowed to offer you. The best roguelites take years to work that out.

So there is, somewhere in here, a good build-crafting idea.

And now the problem

Look at the official screenshots. Not mine: the ones the studio chose to sell its game with.

In the snow level, the rocks are white spheres. Spheres. No texture, no relief, sitting on flat ground. That is not a stylised interpretation, it is a 3D engine primitive of the sort used to block out a level before the art goes in.

The rest follows: a desert with spaced-out cacti, a grey rocky coast, and a generic hooded character seen from behind who could have come from any Unreal project of the last decade.

And the damage numbers are not formatted. In a single screenshot you can read 1,553 on screen, then 1.4351, then 1.488796, then 0.959. Those are raw floating-point numbers. Your combo multiplier reads x1.0002.

Nobody needs to know they have just dealt 1.488796 points of damage. That is an internal variable somebody forgot to round before displaying, and it survived onto the screenshot picked for the store.

The detail that finished me off

The technical specifications on the Steam page list 8 MB of RAM as the minimum and 16 MB as recommended.

Megabytes. Not gigabytes.

Obviously a typo, everybody makes them. But it is on the store page of a commercial game, on launch day, and nobody proofread it.

The description itself fits into one paragraph of interchangeable phrases: face relentless hordes, upgrade your character, adapt your playstyle, every second matters. It closes with a line that could end any advertisement: download Voidfall and enter the arena.

After reading it three times, I still do not know what separates this game from the two hundred other wave survivors released this year. And telling me that is this page's job.

The +1 per cents

Last mechanical point, and the one that worries me most for longevity.

The upgrade cards shown in the official screenshot offer: +1% chance of an extra ball, +1% chance of bouncing, +1% chance of slowing the enemy. The current values displayed beside them are 0%, 0% and 1%.

One per cent. Per card.

In a wave survivor, the pleasure comes from the tipping point: the moment your build takes off and the screen starts exploding on its own. With one per cent increments, that tipping point arrives very late, or not at all, and the first fifteen minutes of every run feel like statistical filler.

It may well be solved further into the progression, through the permanent talents. But it is exactly the kind of curve that makes people quit before they get there.

Where it lands

There are two things in VoidFall that much richer games do not have: an outsized talent tree and a ban system that gives the player real power over randomness.

And there is, around them, a game that was not finished. Blocked-out scenery, variables displayed unrounded, a store page written in a hurry and proofread by nobody.

I have no desire to kick a small studio, and I attribute no bad intentions to anybody: shipping a first game is hard, and this one contains ideas I would be glad to meet again elsewhere.

But a commercial release is a commercial release. When the snow level in your own promotional screenshot shows white spheres standing in for rocks, the message sent to a buyer is that you stopped before the end.

There is a good game in here. What it needs now is finished scenery, rounded numbers, a reworked percentage curve, and a rewritten store page. In that order.

If the studio does that work, we will happily come back. The ban button is worth a return visit.

Know other games that let you remove a card from the draft? It is a rare mechanic and we are collecting them on the InsertCoins Discord.