![]() You combat-hack big lads with guns strapped to their shoulders. You shoot dogs with guns strapped to their shoulders. With a squad of three customised clone soldiers, you explore cyberpunk-themed dungeridoos by means of tile-by-tile first person movement. Only someone’s also dropped a milkshake or something, because I like my metaphors to be unwieldy and unnecessarily detailed. Steve Hogarty called it ‘endless cold, wet concrete’ in his premature evaluation, and I’d tend to agree. It’s cyberpunk as a borrowed aesthetic, rather than as a setting. Neither does it work as commentary, unless you consider the observation that energy drinks exist, and are advertised, to be biting social satire. ![]() There’s some fun writing, delivered via satirical news broadcasts and random events, but they’re all too disconnected from everything else to make the game as a whole work as a dark comedy. ![]() As an RPG, however, it doesn’t do enough with its setting to maintain any real sense of tension or intrigue. There’s a huge amount of attention given to customisation and combat. It sits somewhere between the Ultima Underworld homage of Legend of Grimrock, the debuff-firing turn based combat of Darkest Dungeon, and the base and squad management of Alien Defence Squad Trouser And Hairdo Customisation Adventure 2012, which I believe you proles call XCOM.Īs a set of systems, Conglomerate 451 does some nifty things. Cyberpunk, eh? Cyberpunk indeed, says Conglomerate 451. ![]() Eyes glued to the screen as you watch a text crawl tell the terrifying story of corporate goons going around with big buckets of glue and sticking everyone’s eyes to screens.forever. ![]() Corporations did this.”Īnd that’s you, sucked into a charybdis-level whirlpool of immersion. “This isn’t very interesting.” And then the screen goes all crackly or whatever, and a disembodied voice materialises and says: “The year is 2483, and all humans do is click on menus. “Hmmm, I’ve been clicking on this menu for a while,” You think. My latest big brain critic realisation is that dystopian sci-fi settings are a clever way to make basic (and possibly tedious) elements of interacting with your game, suddenly thematic. ![]()
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