I do not remember when I picked this game up. It was always a game that could easily grab my curiosity, but I honestly do not remember when I got my hands on it. Still when the dice called it up, I figured "why not?" and installed it to my media center machine. About a week later, I think I can see why. A real shame, too. There is a lot of love put into making this one making me wish I could be kinder to it. But a dud is still a dud. Enough of one that I did not finish the game, but merely gave it the 8 hours I warrant before calling it quits.
Story: Welcome to Harbor Prime, a city in a not-too distant cyberpunk future. You will play the roll of Dex, a young woman woken up in the middle of the night via the web. A man going by the name of Raycast warns her that she is in danger and to run! It won't take long for you to find out why though. Once you have managed to reach a safe hiding place, the hacker gets back in touch and explains to you that you are "The Seed of Kether" and this is about where my faith in the writing of this game completely died.
Since this is established early in the game, it isn't much of a spoiler, but I do have to explain a bit to understand why this early moment did it in for me. The people who had tried to kill Dex were under orders from an organization known as "The Complex" which basically boils down to the top member of the corporate world grouped together in a room and ruling everyone from the shadows. This organization made an attempt to rule everything with an even tighter iron fist by developing an AI that could monitor all the net and cyberspace at once and all the time. Unfortunately for them, this AI named Kether became self-aware and escaped. The Complex was able to re-contain it, but not before it put a portion of itself out there with the intent of it coming back and unleashing it again. This portion is believed to reside inside Dex's brain, which is what makes her the Seed. And it's not like this is left to doubt either, as Raycast proves it by guiding her to hack into the net without a link of any sort.
Now, I find this concept very dubious to begin with. After all no matter what program might exist in her brain, Dex is still a human woman with no hardware installed. There is no such thing as software that can manipulate anything physical to do things that are not physically possible, but if I can let that go watching Neo shut down squids in the physical world to enjoy the tail-end the Matrix trilogy, I can let this detail go here. But a little thought still completely destroys this as the AI had to get a piece of itself into her to make her special by the very reason that she IS special. So how the hell did it download anything to her of all people in it's random attempt to preserve it's freedom and self-awareness? Seriously, I rolled my eyes about 10 seconds after the conversation explaining this was over. And unfortunately, I can not give you a valid explanation as I did not get any farther plot-wise in this game, nor has a look around the web for synopsis explained anything deeper then this.
5/10
Graphics: To put it in a word, this game is stunning. You will be running around a 2D world where the artists hand-painted everything you will see outside of the credits. And while this does mean the animation in the cutscenes will be limited, it fits together for one complete look, and one that clearly a lot of love went into. In fact this is one of the few games to outright floor me with the thought put into this. When I first got to the Chinese area, I noticed the bottom of the screen filled with blurred shadows, as if we can see even more of the city crowd walking around, but they are not where we are or should be paying attention. It's the kind of detail this developer took the time to add for atmosphere that many major studios would miss. Indeed, every sprite, every background, and every facial image for conversations just look spectacular... almost.
There is a specific area I came across called the Aphrodite Club which is very XXX rated. And the place advertises what kind of services you can get. (This is not a game for kids, just so you know.) And while the sprites are painted and fit the art of the game, some of the animation is strikingly stiff, breaking that fit when you see it in motion. Thankfully this seems to only be this location that I can tell, but it just stands out in all the wrong ways.
But at the same time, there is another core section of the game that also breaks away from this look: Cyberspace. When you hack from a computer terminal, the screen changes to a dark background of hex-patters surrounded by pac-man-like walls. In this virtual world, everything including yourself is abstract, and it is frankly jarring at first. And yet it somehow works, and even makes sense when you use real-world hacking (the background changes to a dulled out world and there are no walls, but everything you learned in how it works in cyberspace still applies).
8/10
Sound: Much like the graphics the sound design in this game is simply awesome. True, sound effects are fairly standard at best with all the bangs, clangs, thuds and booms you would expect, but this is not the limit of what you get. Rather, the things to really hold you to the world here are the sound track and voice acting. Not that the music will stay with you long after you play, unfortunately. It is fairly generic synth-wave, but that does not mean it does not finish the picture of every location you will come in contact with.
But the voice work fairs a bit better as much like the graphics, you can see just how much love and effort the actors put into their characters. Everyone fits their roll perfectly and whether you find yourself liking, laughing at, or wanting to smack the character, you can be pretty sure that is exactly what they wanted you to do.
9/10
Gameplay: Sadly this is a much weaker point in the game then it's artistic qualities. As noted in the graphics you are playing a side-scrolling platformer/Roll-Playing-Game hybrid, the majority of which will have you exploring the locations of the cities from slums and sewers to hi-rises and corporate offices. And that exploration is guided by the quests you will be given as you interact with the people of this city, but this is also the first major issue the game has... those interactions.
Don't get me wrong, those interactions are very well done in their own right, but they often do not give you enough information on the quest they might progress. You find yourself more often then not breaking the flow of the game by pausing to read the mission recap in the hopes of getting literally anywhere. Since most people would expect the conversation itself to have all the information you need, you will find yourself wandering aimlessly from time to time because of it. Sometimes you may even think you finished your quest but find when reading the recap there is more to be done. But not even this will assure you of a clue to what you need to do next, as many missions will just drop off incomplete in your list, but reading like you are done anyway. Sometimes the only way forward is to literally luck into a solution (which did happen to me a couple of times).
Complicating things further are the maps themselves. While they are straight up pieces of art in the game, they are also very unclear about where you can go. Doors will be marked with an arrow when you are close enough, but not much else gets any explanation. Rather, the game expects you to understand a layout that traded clarity for that beauty often leaving you wondering where you can actually go. It further does not help that there is no "going down" in the case of stairs or like choices. You can only "go down" by jumping down to a lower platform, making a lot of movement around the city feel incomplete.
But this would not be a cyberpunk game if you were just jumping around. Sometimes you gotta get violent and messy, and this the game does well, giving you a surprising amount of maneuverability and choices of when and how to strike when duking it out on the streets. At first it is just using a combination of punches, drop kicks, and blocks while running, jumping and rolling out of the way, requiring you to learn your opponents to be as effective as possible, and it actually works to make the game that much more interesting. You can even hide and do take-downs if you can get behind someone without them noticing (and they are not twice your size). But you will find your options increase as you build up your combat skills and arsonal through the game, and that can only make things even better in this way.
And of course what would a cyberpunk game be without hacking on some level? That too is something you will be doing a lot, but how you do it will likely change how fun it is. And yes, hacking can be fun in this game when doing it from someone's terminal. When you do this the game switches over to a twin-stick shooter where you will navigate a maze populated with virus generators, turrets, black holes, and all kinds of other obstacles you will have to dodge and destroy as you seek out tibits of information on the machine. With the ability to play with the level itself, this becomes an absolute blast to play, but sadly there is another way you will hack which takes away a lot of that fun... and that's hacking directly in the real world.
This mode does away with the level and changes the goal from finding data to hacking a specific thing in the real world and doing so turns the game into bullet hell as viruses pour down on you from all corners of the map. Add to this you can't wander too far from the object you are hacking since you do so by staying in a defined circle for the time it takes to finish the hack and leaving will let it rebuild it's resistance, and it becomes frustrating. Not only that but if you are forced to leave, the item in question get to build up that timer again and if it fills up it's own defense programs respawn. In short it's a frustrating mess you WILL have to play from time to time.
The long and short of all of this is a game that has the potential to be awesome, but instead squanders it in sub-par choices that do nothing but leave the player frustrated more often than not.
4/10
Bugs: While looking around to research what I missed, I noticed this game is notorious for being buggy, but that was not my experience. Rather the closest thing I saw to a bug was bad design as mentioned in the gameplay section. And yet I have to also report a bad technical choice as well: this game uses the Windows Registry to save games. I shit you not and this a TERRIBLE practice I can only hope if the developers are still making games they grew out of.
Overall: This game is a real shame. I can see the love put into it and under the grime and grit there is serious potential to make something special. However this game doesn't just miss the mark, it throws the damn gun rather then fire it.
Score:
4/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Pentium or AMD CPU running at 2.0 or faster
- 1.5 GB RAM
- NVIDIA Geforce 8800 or ATI Radeon 2600
- Windows XP (SP2 or newer)/Vista/7/8
- 8 GB hard drive space
- Ryzen 3 2200G running at 3.5 Ghz
- 16 GB RAM
- Windows 10
- PDP DX Wired Controller (Crimson)
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