Preview: Gravebound: Fighting Homicidal Toasters in a Junk-Punk Wasteland
Extraction shooters and looter-shooters share enough genetic material that mashing them together feels inevitable. Gravebound attempts exactly that, borrowing a smattering of inspirations from genre heavy-hitters—most notably wrapping itself in the thick-lined, cel-shaded visual identity of the Borderlands franchise.
But where a game like ARC Raiders pits you against towering, militarized industrial mechs, Gravebound asks a much sillier question: what if humanity was wiped out because we gave our home appliances Wi-Fi? You and up to five other players are tasked with fighting off machines gone rogue. Instead of heavily armed death-bots, you’re fending off homicidal toasters, freezing refrigerators, and aggressively territorial Roombas.
The core loop revolves around deploying into these junk-punk cityscapes to scavenge scrap and rare tech to upgrade your gear. The deeper you push, the better the loot, but the risk of a squad wipe—and losing your hard-earned salvage—scales up drastically.
That risk factor brings up the game’s first major hurdle: the six-player team size. Mustering a full, coordinated squad of six is difficult–especially for older gamers like me. And because the game is currently sitting at a “Mixed” user rating on Steam, the matchmaking pool is relatively shallow.
Solo drops were my primary way to play. While I didn’t have much trouble surviving the starting “noobtown” areas alone, progress beyond that wall requires a level of grinding and dedication I simply wasn’t ready to invest in a currently underpopulated game.
The actual gameplay is fun enough. The shooting and movement feel closest to Fortnite. It operates at a deliberate, medium-paced cadence where you aren't slide-canceling at top speed, but rather relying on measured strafing and accurate fire. The rogue appliances aren’t tactical masterminds–the true difficulty stems from the sheer density of the hordes and their punishing damage output if they manage to swarm you.
Because Gravebound is fresh into Early Access, the final verdict is still a long way off. The developers currently project a 10-to-18-month development timeframe–dependent on community feedback.
That time is desperately needed to address the friction driving those “Mixed” Steam reviews, which seem to be a mixture of technical hiccups, and some controversy regarding a competition the developers held. A few of them mention the same solo player problem I had, too.
For now, I’m going to reserve final judgment until Gravebound takes its 1.0 form. Beneath the current roadblocks lies a fairly competent shooter that is mostly limited by rigid design choices rather than foundational flaws. Implementing dynamically scalable difficulty and dedicated solo-play balancing would go a long way toward making this wasteland more enticing. Until then, I’ll be keeping an eye on it from a safe distance to see which direction it takes.
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