If you’ve been underground in your steampunk digging machine for too long, you may have missed Volcanoids, a 2019 Steam Early Access survival game. Even if you haven’t missed it, then 2020 is the perfect time to unearth this gem of a title with the addition of co-op.
Volcanoids teams survival, base building and exploration, all wrapped up in a unique aesthetic. The game employs a Jules Verne-esque steampunk look, a style which, while very popular, is oddly missing from film, television and in this case, video games.
My co-op buddy and I arrived at our destination in our submarine, an island with a violent volcano raging at its center. At various points, it will erupt, destroying everything on the island, meaning we’ll need to seek shelter. The frequency of these eruptions depends on the game’s difficulty level.
But a terrifying volcano is the least of our troubles, as this otherwise idyllic island is crawling with volcano powered robots. These mechanical miscreants scurry around the island, getting between you and the precious resources you need to survive. Luckily, I had Jimmy Donnellan himself watching my back as we ran around the island in search of ingredients.
But there’s one thing which I am sure has caught many-a steampunk enthusiast’s attention in Volcanoids’ advertising: those giant drilling machines, named drillships. Volcanoids features huge, pilotable drilling machines that tunnel under the ground, and this is where much of the gameplay comes in.
The drillship features various machines for building items, ammunition and additional units to the machine itself, one of the earliest missions tasking us with building a turret extension to the side. There are also various machines which allow you to process materials such as copper or sulphur, that in turn can be used to build medipacks, weapons and so forth.
When it’s eruption time, we jump inside our digging machine and tunnel our way underground, safe from the oncoming ash cloud that coats the island, with only our periscope to work out when it’s safe to emerge. Tunneling underground is a basic, but unique, aspect of the game. We were able to make our way around underground and dig up extra resources, before we found an exit point to return to the surface, and luckily there wasn’t already a drillship there.
The system for piloting the drillship is simple, with a two dimensional plan of the island’s underground network. Soil can be tunneled through easily, but harder rock can block your way, forcing you to find a way around. There are also streams of underground lava, some of which can be passed through, but causes damage to the drillship — thicker lava is unpassable.
Once we found the breaching point, we returned to the surface and continued our search for resources. Using the drillship, we moved our base of operations around, which is handy as we don’t have to sprint halfway across the island to retrieve a backpack if one of us was killed. Volcanoids isn’t a particularly difficult game, but on harder difficulty levels, it does ramp up a fair bit.
Myself and Jim were both overwhelmed quickly when trying to navigate the world alone, so proper co-op is perfect to remedy this. Dying and not retrieving my backpack left me weaponless, which led to the pair of us taking on a daring raid for resources, Jim watching my back and me mining for my life, all so I could just craft a new gun. Roaming the map alone isn’t easy at harder levels, but working as a team meant that we were able to do a lot more than we would alone.
While Volcanoids has been a single player experience since release, it feels very much at home as a co-op experience, and I now prefer to play it with someone else. Fighting off attacks, raiding enemy drillships and scavenging for supplies is a lot of fun as a team, or in our case duo. Upgrading our drillship was an especially cool thing to do, giving both of us big things to work towards.
It wasn’t all entirely perfect, as the host the game ran fine, but as guests, both Jimmy and Inoticed a fair bit of lag, nothing that couldn’t be worked around, but still a little annoying. The robotic enemies can be plenty irritating at times, often being able to hit you with killer accuracy at long range, and the gunplay is a little underwhelming. Also, while robots come in different colours, there was very little variation in the type of enemies we were up against.
There were also a couple of other niggles with the actual gameplay itself. There’s no marker to indicate where your co-op partner is, so finding them can be frustrating. Swapping items is also a bit of a bug bear, as there isn’t a simple way to do this at the moment. But this is still an Early Access title with a lot of updates to go before it is finished.
That said, hats off to the developer, Volcanoid, for listening to feedback and keeping the game regularly updated. The game has had continuous development over the last 18 months and continues to do so. While co-op does have some issues, it is still very fun and I fully expect it to get better with upcoming updates.
Volcanoids is most definitely an interesting addition to the survival genre. While it doesn’t feature the usual survival mechanics such as starvation or dehydration, it tends to push players towards exploration and base building, or in this case, drillship upgrading. It’s a rather unique game with great design choices, so if you’re looking for a lockdown survival game to play with your mates, you can do a lot worse than Volcanoids.
Two Steam keys were provided by PR for the purposes of this preview
READ NEXT: Best Survival Games You Should Play
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.
