Is Mycopunk Worth It? Who Should Buy the 1.0 Release

Is Mycopunk worth it at 1.0? The short answer

The overall score is the strong part. The recent window is softer, and the reviews we read explain why: the complaints are almost all about difficulty and playing alone, not about the guns.

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What Mycopunk actually is

Steam's own pitch is honest: a "mission based looter shooter" with "hundreds of hand-crafted upgrades, 4-player co-op, and a little roach man." You're a disposable contractor dropped onto a fungus-infested planet, you run a mission, you get back in the drop pod, you spend the loot. (As of 1.0, if nobody makes it into the pod, the mission fails. Harsh, but fair.)

The hook is the enemies. They're built from parts, and the parts don't die with their owner. One reviewer put it well: you shoot a weapon off an enemy, and "another enemy WILL pick it up." That makes a fight feel less like clearing a room and more like wrestling a pile of spare limbs. If that sounds like Deep Rock Galactic crossed with a loot game, you're in the right postcode.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Pigeons at Play / Devolver Digital)

The other half is the upgrade screen above: each weapon has a hex grid, and upgrades are pieces you rotate and fit into it. That's where the build-crafting lives, and it's the part long-time players rave about.

What the 1.0 trailer shows

Devolver's launch trailer is under a minute and doesn't waste much of it. At 0:08 the caption reads "squad up, power up, clean up." At 0:14 it promises "five dispensible employees" (their spelling), and at 0:17 it cuts to Glider's select screen with Rocket Salvo and a wingsuit. The 0:29 card says "massive modular enemies," and at 0:44 we get the Diffraction Driver's upgrade grid, the new gun, before the 0:50 end card names Steam and PS5.

What 1.0 adds over Early Access

The launch post is long. The parts that change what you'd be buying:

• A fifth employee, the Mycologist. Abilities Sporelift and Fungal Skewer plus a passive infection, and you rescue her in a mission called Expedition Alpha before you can play her.
• X11-B, a new region on the planet's moonlet. The studio built it to challenge players who've been around since Early Access. It's also where the new cryo Snowball Grenade unlocks.
• The Diffraction Driver, an ion scattergun whose cone tightens and stretches when you spin up its halo. It unlocks after level 10.
• A new mission type, Population Control, plus Fulfillments (an in-game achievement tracker that pays out cosmetics) and, yes, hats.

Patch 2.0.1 landed a day later and fixed Fulfillments that weren't progressing and two achievements, Cranius and Bunker Buster, that weren't unlocking. One known bug remains: equipping a drop pod skin can make some lighting disappear until you restart. Small stuff, fixed fast. The studio also says post-release content updates are already in the works, and an optional Supporter Pack sells cosmetics for anyone who wants to tip.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Pigeons at Play / Devolver Digital)

Solo or co-op: the question that decides it

Here's the asterisk. The most pointed negative reviews from before 1.0 are about playing alone. One player with 14 hours wrote that "its just impossible to enjoy Solo. Enemies are incredibly accurate even at long distance." Another refunded it as "a co-op without the co-op."

The 1.0 notes answer some of that, quietly. The enemy cap is "slightly lowered" for solo players on threat 3 and 4, Missileheads attack slower and hit softer, Optical Jammers show up less, and enemy autocannons fire slower. Employee upgrade trees now start at rare upgrades, so early builds get interesting sooner. None of that turns it into a solo game. It does take the edge off the exact things solo reviewers named.

The best solo advice we found came from a player who prefers it to Deep Rock Galactic, Helldivers 2 and Far Far West: "play with fewer swarms and go to the roguelike mode as soon as possible," build something broken there, and carry pieces of it back. That's also the honest expectation for the opening: one reviewer says the game "isn't anything special" at first, then "it clicks" after about two hours.

Crowds matter for a co-op game. When we checked at 08:01 UTC on Thursday, October 22 (the middle of the night in the US), Steam counted 1,289 people playing. That's a modest number. It's also two days into 1.0, during a weekday dead zone.

Screenshot: Steam store page (Pigeons at Play / Devolver Digital)

Who should buy it, and who should wait

• Buy it if you have a group. Two to four friends, half price, and a loot loop that holds up for at least one serious veteran of Risk of Rain 2 and DRG. That 86-hour player came from "hundreds of hours in RoR1, RoR2, and DRG" and calls it "an extremely fresh take."
• Buy it solo if you like hard shooters and builds. Use the roguelike mode, keep swarms low, and give it the first couple of hours.
• Wait if you're on Mac or Linux. Steam lists Windows only.
• Skip it if you want a calm shooter. Even fans describe the fights as chaotic, and the newest region is designed to be harder.

If you're shopping for the group instead, our best co-op games of September and the indie co-op picks from the summer sale cover the alternatives, including Far Far West in co-op and Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core. Our list of Early Access games worth buying has more games that, like this one, earned their 1.0, and our indie games under $15 picks fit the same budget.

Our take

We'd buy Mycopunk now, in the sale, for a co-op night. The review history says the shooting and the build-crafting are the real thing, and 1.0 adds enough (a new employee, a harder region, a new gun) to make the full price fair once the discount ends. Solo players should still buy it if Deep Rock-style chaos is their idea of fun; just don't judge it on the first hour.

How we checked this

We haven't played Mycopunk. On October 22, 2026 we read the Steam store page, the 1.0 launch post, the two pre-launch dev posts and the 2.0.1 patch notes, pulled review totals and the most recent English reviews from Steam, read the live player count from Steam's API, and stepped through Devolver's 1.0 launch trailer every three seconds for the timestamps above. Reddit's Mycopunk community had no 1.0 threads we could read.

References

1. Mycopunk on Steam, Steam
2. 1.0 IS HERE!!! (launch notes), Pigeons at Play on Steam
3. 1.0 and the Moon, Pigeons at Play on Steam
4. Patch 2.0.1, Pigeons at Play on Steam
5. Mycopunk 1.0 launch trailer, Devolver Digital on YouTube
6. Official site, Pigeons at Play