Image: Pigeons at Play & Devolver Digital

Like shooting stuff in space? Got a buddy or three? Hate mushrooms and/or hideous space laser tentacles? Mycopunk might just be the shooter for you. Better yet, it just left early access today and is going extremely cheap, thanks to a steep 50% launch discount. And having played a few rounds of it, I can confirm that it's weird, wiggly fun, if a distinctly more indie production than its peers.

The setup is rather Borderlands. There's a galactic war going on, which means that the Saxon corporation can't afford to send real people to figure out why one of their resource planets has gone silent, so they're sending 1-4 expendable robots instead. That's you, and potentially some friends, in very Deep Rock Galactic-esque style, albeit with less mining. Pick a mission, drop to the surface, do violence, get back in the extraction pod, rinse and repeat.

Turns out, the planet has a fungal infection, and no amount of athlete's foot cream will fix things, as the fungus is the kind that grows thirty-foot-long tentacles that shoot lasers and commandeer any piece of household or industrial machinery it can latch onto, and this is why Mycopunk is fun and cool: There are very few pre-set enemy designs. Everything you fight is a procedurally assembled mess of biological and mechanical components that can be disassembled piece by piece as well.

Sometimes it's worth drilling into an enemy's mushroomy core for a quick kill, but when the chassis it chose was an industrial fridge, you'll probably take less damage if you take out any aggressive tentacles it might have, or just take out any legs and outpace it. And of course, some of the mushroom-mechs you'll encounter have grown very large, necessitating multi-phase boss fight shenanigans. Good fun, and as there's tons of locational damage, there's always a sense you're making an impact.

There's little subtlety to the shooting, especially as you've got a two-gun loadout and firing one reloads/recharges the other, meaning that picking a pair you can just continually alternate between is the way to go. This is a class-based shooter, with each of the five playable robots having their own special ability and a grid of upgrades to level up through as you work your way up the difficulty tiers.

The V1.0 launch version adds that final fifth robot to play as - the Mycologist - a partially-infested oddball who needs to be unlocked via a rescue mission later into the story. There's a new mission type, a new sidequest to find a perfect couch for your home base, and a new weapon: the Diffraction Driver, a shotgun that can be charged to tighten the spread and extend its range. There's lots of other little bits (including a new achievement system with unlockable hats), but you can browse the full details here.

Mycopunk is out now for £13/$15, but with a 50% launch discount until November 3rd, and further savings if you own Far Far West, LORT, Gunfire Reborn or Abyssus, which are all cool games and worth checking out if you've got a friend group who like shooting weird things. The game is also out on PlayStation 5, but no cross-play, so you may have to bring your own buddies.