So finally I get around to play something that is relatively recent. This was a virtually unknown game when it was released by a brand new studio. It quickly gained attention due to its beautiful cyberpunk visuals and due to the bugginess of Cyberpunk 2077 on release, was even hailed as the superior game. To me, the isometric view and gun-based reminded me of Crusader: No Remorse, an old game I have fond memories of, so I bought it not long afterwards. Unfortunately while its visuals are indeed fantastic, I’d judge its gameplay to be only average while its story and characters are downright forgettable.
The game is set in a far off future on a planet populated both by humans and aliens and dominated by powerful megacorporations. The player is a lowly indentured worker contracted to the Ascent Group who controls the arcology you live in. When the group suddenly goes bankrupt and the AI that runs everything goes silent, a power vacuum emerges. Your immediate employer orders you to undertake a series of missions to establish the independence of your habitat cluster. Soon enough however rival megacorporations arrive, either to appropriate various stranded assets or to take control of the entire arcology and you become a pawn in their struggles. In particular, everyone wants to find out why the Ascent Group collapsed, especially when clues emerge that they were working on some cutting-edge research that has the potential to revolutionize the galaxy when it happened.
The story is bad on multiple levels, and despite featuring megacorporations, is really just generic science-fiction and not cyberpunk at all. I expected the player to be a laborer picking up a weapon to lead a revolution or something. Instead you’re just a gun for hire throughout the entirety of the game with no choice and no agency whatsoever over the missions you must undertake. Your bosses constantly denigrate and berate you even when you succeed and it barely matters what it is that you are actually doing. Taking over expensive assets or even entire branches of a corporation seem to entail just plugging an AI into the right console and letting it do its thing. Whatever, you’re just there to kill everyone and everything in the way. One thing to note is that most of your interlocutors seem to be aliens. I suspect that is because it is harder to animate human characters realistically.
The game is a twin-stick shooter, a genre that is no longer popular now. The character can move in any direction while pointing and shooting in any other direction. In the base game, there are no real options to use melee weapons so the action is really all about shooting guns. You can crouch for cover but I found that to be not very useful as enemies spawn in all directions and being mobile is more important. You can also aim high to hit enemies behind some obstacle but that isn’t really an interesting mechanic. You can also activate various special abilities depending on the cybernetics you have installed. These include simple things like grenades, a hydraulic slam attack that I like to use in lieu of other melee options, various shades of healing options and even ridiculous stuff like being able to deploy a mech for you to jump into. There are different damage types so you should switch between weapons against different enemies for best effect and you have a hacking ability that is effective against certain devices deployed by enemies. In general, this is alright but not terribly innovative stuff.
Between all of these various options and a very generous health level, your character feels plenty powerful. Yet you’ll need that power as the game happily throws large waves of enemies at you, even from behind you in areas that should already be cleared. Everything from ghoul-like ferals to megacorporation enforcers and mechs will be attacking you. They have area-of-effect attacks and can even target and shoot you from off-screen. During large battles, the action is pure chaos and though your handlers will warn you about it, causing massive collateral damage is inevitable and has no consequences. The combat is rather fun, especially when you get to try out new weapons like miniguns and self-aiming bullets. Unfortunately it gets repetitive and there is so much of it. Enemies are constantly aggroed wherever you go and as this is a game where you frequently need to traverse the same areas over and over again many times, it’s very annoying. Low-level enemies have no chance against you past a certain point yet the same groups of enemies will always attack you in the same pattern every time you walk by even when they can’t even scratch you.
At least these battles take place in a beautifully designed and rendered environment. The neon-lit, rain-slicked streets are so gorgeous I wished I go see it from a closer perspective than the isometric view we get. There is so much detail and variety in the levels: slums strewn with garbage, downtown areas with busy bars and noodle stands, a corporate zone with office buildings, a spaceport and so on. The map is huge. You can traverse across the levels of the arcology in lifts or across them using a train network or pay for flying taxis. As usual with such beautiful worlds though, the main way you interact with the world is through combat. You can blow things up and kill civilians. You can walk into shops to buy guns or armor. But as your character has no need to eat or sleep, the rest is just eye candy or places for poorly written quest-giver characters to hang out in. The in-game economy isn’t great either. You start out very poor but soon enough you’ll have more money than you know what to do with as the items you really want to use come from drops and not from shops. Might as well just spend all the cash on taxis.
The excellence of the environmental art doesn’t quite extend to character design either. The clothes and armor pieces frequently seem generic sci-fi rather than cyberpunk. For too long your character is stuck in what looks like t-shirt and cargo pants. Then at a certain point you go on to power armor. As I mentioned, the game seems to resort to alien characters to avoid the hassle of animating human faces. In lieu of expressive faces, they try to have the aliens gesticulate during conversations, resulting in them moving their arms and hands far too much. Animations in general look awkward though that’s always a tough job when the character needs to be able to move in any direction at the same speed while facing a different direction.
In the end, it seems clear that the developers have a fantastic art team and devoted an impressive amount of work into creating this world. Yet in other respects, the team is only mediocre. I liked exploring new areas but the game started to feel too long to me when I kept having to fight the same enemies in the same areas over and over again. I’m particularly disappointed in that the game is nothing like Crusader: No Remorse which was much more deliberately paced. This one is a crazy twitch-fest though I concede that you probably can’t get away with an action game being so slow these days. Anyway it’s a beautiful game to look at but by the time the credits rolled I was glad to be done with it and have no interest in any of the DLCs.
