VOID/BREAKER Review: Destruction Is the Whole Game, and It Works

Some games sell you a weapon. VOID/BREAKER sells you a demolition permit. Stubby Games' roguelite FPS launched November 4 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and PC, and the early verdict is that the destruction is not decoration, it is the entire combat loop. Game Informer scored it 8.5 out of 10, the only major critic review published so far, and the Steam user response has been loud and positive. This Void Breaker review pulls together that launch coverage, the critical reception, and the community feedback to deliver our own verdict: a chaotic, confident shooter that earns its score, with a few cracks in the foundation.

The setup is pure Portal with a mean streak. You are a test subject trapped in an endless sequence run by IRIS, a hostile AI that wants you dead in increasingly creative ways. An AI voice in your head talks you through multi-arena stages where thousands of runners try to reach the end and beat a boss. The stages shift through liminal spaces, beaches, and snow-capped cliffs, and every one of them is fully destructible. That last part is the game.

Void Breaker review: destruction is the combat loop

Most games with destruction systems treat it as a party trick. VOID/BREAKER builds the whole fight around it. Enemies caught under falling rubble are instantly staggered, and that stagger window is when you kill them. Grenades, gravity-thrown explosives, and your guns all exist to bring the ceiling down on something. Game Informer's Wesley LeBlanc put it well: the ruin is visually spectacular, but the important part is that it is a critical aspect of the roguelite design. Break stuff, then kill. That is the formula, and it holds up across the roughly 12-hour run to the credits.

The movement supports the chaos. A grappling hook and a gravity tether keep you moving fast, and the arenas are built with verticality that rewards players who treat the ceiling as a weapon. The pace is relentless in the best way: this is a shooter that wants you sprinting, sliding, and blowing holes in walls, not crouching behind cover waiting for a cooldown.

A small arsenal that feels enormous

You pick one weapon per run from a short list: pistol, shotgun, machine gun, sniper, and a few more. On paper that sounds thin. In practice, the mod system turns each gun into something unrecognizable by the end of a run. LeBlanc's review describes an SMG with mods that made every bullet electric, fired missiles with each shot, wrapped bullets in a destructive orb, and added a ricochet perk that bounced shots off walls and split them. Add an ability mod that throws infinite grenades for a limited time, and the screen fills with so much destruction that the game itself crashed on the reviewer. That is both a compliment and a warning, and we will come back to the warning.

The mod system also fixes the classic roguelite problem of runs feeling samey. Fewer than a dozen base weapons produce hundreds of permutations, and the endgame adds run modifications that make an already chaotic shooter even more anarchic. Mid-run saves mean a great build is not one crash away from oblivion, which matters when the game is throwing this much at the screen. The Steam community has noticed too: the most repeated praise in user reviews is the build variety, the fair RNG, and the feeling that every run gives you a new toy to break things with. One widely echoed comparison calls it Destiny 2 meets Returnal with the rules of Hades, and that is not a bad summary.

Where it stumbles

The boss fights are the weakest link. They are simple bullet-hell arenas, and the coverage agrees that they rarely kill you, which is a problem when the rest of the game is so demanding. A roguelite lives or dies on its bosses, and these feel like an afterthought next to the arena combat. The story framework is also thin: the Portal-style AI voice is charming, but it is a frame for the shooting, not a narrative that carries the game.

Then there is stability. The Steam reviews include reports of crashes in Zone 4 and later, with players losing progress on reload, and Game Informer's review mentions a crash caused by the sheer on-screen chaos. That is the kind of problem a small team can patch, and Stubby Games has a track record of supporting the game through a long Early Access period, but it is a real caveat on day one. If you buy now, expect the occasional hard crash when the destruction peaks.

The other caveat is scope. At $29.99 on Steam, with a launch discount bringing it to $17.99, this is a fairly priced game for a 12-hour campaign plus an endgame. But players who want a 40-hour epic or a deep story will find the package lean. VOID/BREAKER knows what it is, and it does not pretend to be more.

The verdict

VOID/BREAKER is one of the most purely fun shooters of the year, and the score reflects that: the destruction is a genuine mechanic, the mod system turns a small arsenal into hundreds of builds, and the 12-hour runtime is tight enough that nothing gets stale. The boss fights are flat, the story is a frame rather than a feature, and the stability wobbles when the chaos peaks, but none of that outweighs how good it feels to drop a building on a robot.

Game Informer's 8.5 is the only major score on the board so far, and Metacritic has not calculated a Metascore yet with just one critic review in. The community response so far backs the number up. If you want a roguelite FPS that respects your time and rewards aggression, this is an easy recommendation, crashes and all. For a deeper dive into the systems before you buy, our VOID/BREAKER beginner guide covers the mod system and the early zones, and if you want more fast-paced action, our Phantom Blade Zero combat guide breaks down another of this season's standout action games. You can check the game out on Steam, where the launch discount runs alongside the full release.