Mycopunk is a four-player, mission-based looter shooter from Pigeons at Play, published by Devolver Digital, and it left Early Access on 20 October 2026. You play a robot exterminator in the New Atlas Hazard Crew, hired by the SAXON corporation to fight a planet-wide fungal outbreak. The shooting is familiar. The upgrade system is not: every upgrade is a shape you physically fit onto a hexagonal grid, and how you fit it matters as much as what it rolls.
What Mycopunk actually is
It is not a wave shooter with a shop, and it is not a roguelike in the usual sense. A mission sends you into a region with a main objective and optional side objectives, you complete them, you call the drop pod, and you leave. Since 1.0, if nobody reaches the pod, the mission fails outright. Enemies come to you, so farming mobs wastes a mission slot — the reward is the extraction.
What makes it stick is the enemy design. Enemies are modular: guns, shields, legs and cores are separate parts, and a weapon you shoot off one enemy can be picked up by another.
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Developer | Pigeons at Play (published by Devolver Digital) |
| Release | 20 October 2026, 1.0 out now |
| Price | $14.99, launched at 50% off |
| Players | 1-4 online co-op, no local co-op |
How a run of missions works
Between missions you are on an orbital dropship — the HUB — with vendors, an arcade machine and an insectoid SAXON veteran named Roachard Cox. From there you pick a mission, choose a threat level from 1 to 7, optionally stack modifiers, and drop.
Inside the mission the loop is objective-driven. You fight through a fixed regional layout — layouts are consistent per biome, so map knowledge is permanent progress — finish the main objective, mop up side objectives if time allows, then call the pod. Upgrades, materials and employee XP land on the end-of-mission screen.
Then you spend it on grids: each weapon and employee has its own hex grid, and upgrades are shapes. The constraint is space, not slots.
Is it worth buying
At $14.99 it is priced like an indie and built like a game people play for hundreds of hours. The honest caveats:
- The first two hours are the weakest. Players repeatedly describe the loop clicking around the two-hour mark.
- The 1.0 infusion change is divisive. Stats scale with pattern size, so shrinking exotics no longer comes free.
- It is not a solo campaign. Solo works and 1.0 lowered solo enemy caps, but the design assumes a crew splitting roles.
If you like Deep Rock Galactic, Borderlands, or an extraction shooter without PvP anxiety, this is in that space.
Where to start reading
- Beginner guide — mission loop, first employee, first upgrades.
- Upgrade grid — hex patterns, infusion, turbocharges.
- Weapons — the arsenal by family, and the unlocks that gate you.
- Enemies — strip the weapon, then the shield, then the core.
- Regions and threat levels.
- Ouroboros when you want one specific upgrade.
- All 48 achievements for completion.
One day after launch, Expedition Alpha — which unlocks the new Mycologist — sits at 0.7% completion, and so does a threat 7 clear. Everything here is checked against the 1.0 build notes.
