I actually hate this game. The world is interesting, the combat isn't bad but not great, and overall it'd be something I could play through and get some enjoyment out of it.

But no, they couldn't let that be.

The game is built in a way where if you're off to do quests, you have to go through map transfers, but to do map transfers, you have to defeat enemies spawn guarding the exits/entrances, because you can't move to another map when you're in combat, so you have to fight 1000 battles doing side quests and stuff that you normally wouldn't ever do, which makes the game just unplayable bore fest trash. They did a lot well but one design choice completely ruined the whole game without remorse.

Me he acabado el juego con la mayoría de misiones secundarias esperando que al final me acabase gustando... pero no. Ya no solo es que el juego tenga caídas constantes de FPS, o que el control sea bastante lento. Es que es repetitivo como el que más. Hay muchas misiones secundarias que consisten en pelear, o en llegar a un cofre peleando por el camino. Y ya. Las zonas son bastante pequeñas y acabas yendo a la misma muchísimas veces de forma que te la aprendes por muy laberíntica que pretenda ser. Dado que los personajes no están bien construidos ni desarrollados, hay momento de intensa emoción donde me he quedado mirando a la pantalla sin saltar la escena solo por respeto a los desarrolladores, pero poco más. Los enemigos vuelven a hacer spawn todo el rato en esas misma localizaciones, obligándote a matar a los mismo enemigos una y otra vez hasta el hastío. No haré spoiler, pero hay una zona en una ciudad donde llegado el momento un grupo de gente te ataca. Pues bien, habrá matado a ese grupo de gente como 25 o 30 veces. He acabado odiando ese lugar solo por cosas como esa.

Como puntos buenos a destacar, supongo que el sistema de combate no está mal, aunque hay unas forma de pelea bastante superior a otras. En difícil los enemigos pueden suponer un reto debido a que te matan de 3 golpes (y tus compañeros son completamente inútiles), aunque he acabado con más de 60 botiquines en difícil, así que tampoco es la gran cosa. Y bueno, supongo que hay canciones reconocibles que pueden estar bien, pero nada es la gran cosa.

PD: Se me olvidaba. El juego es feo. Pero feo feo feo.
PD2: Ophir, te odio con todo mi alma, cansas hasta al más pintado.

Back in 2013 developer Spiders released the downloadable RPG known as Mars: War Logs. It was a flawed, low-budget title that was clearly trying to ape the works of BioWare at a fraction of the scale. It succeeded rather admirably considering how small the project was, and showed what potential Spiders could have if they were given the financial freedom to more fully chase their ambitions.

Three years later and out came The Technomancer. An indirect sequel that sees them revisiting the world they created on Mars, only this time backed by more money. It's not a triple-A production by any means (more like double-A), but they were certainly able to create a much better game as a result. However, The Technomancer isn't quite a true success story. Some of War Logs' issues are still hanging around. So rather that being the title that cements Spiders reputation as one of the RPG greats, it's more of just another step in the right direction that shows off their increasing skill as a developer and what heights they could reach later on down the road.

By far the game's greatest strengths lie in its world and story. Set on a version of the red planet that's plagued by an endless war between corporations over water, you play as the newest inductee into a group of powerful warriors with a pretty big secret to hide. What follows is a lot of treachery and backstabbing that sees you on the run with a group of interesting, if a tad underdeveloped companions and getting involved with various factions across Mars. Interesting stuff, and thanks to the excellent amount of player choice I really felt like I made a significant impact on the planet by the time the credits rolled.

The areas you'll discover and explore are quite memorable and full of personality. Although they aren't the prettiest to look at. The Technomancer's graphics are certainly dated. Characters animations are stiff and awkward during gameplay, and the fact that only their mouths move during conversations make everyone you come in contact with look a little plastic.

When it comes to defining your own playstyle you really get to see how deep the game's RPG mechanics are. Multiple branching skill trees allow you to outfit yourself with a variety of interesting abilities and buffs. The combat system also has a lot of flexibility as it lets you switch between four different styles on the fly. Unfortunately, neither of these elements are able to shine like they should do to some troubling balance issues.

I started the game off on normal, but quickly had to switch it to easy just to make any progress. The default difficulty setting is the equivalent of nightmare mode in any other game. No matter how much you level up even the basic enemy types can decimate in only a few hits while you're only able to continuously chip away at their seemingly much larger health bars while hoping to not die from an attack you just didn't see coming. I thought technomancers were supposed to be tough?

But even when I lowered the difficulty I wasn't exactly having a blast. Unfortunately easy mode turned out to be too, well, easy. Outside of a few boss and mini-boss encounters I was largely able to button mash my way through every fight. So I never really felt the need to experiment with all of the different styles and powers I had at my disposal. A shame because the combat system is really great on paper and the environments are littered with enemy encounters so it's not like you can really avoid fighting. With no comfortable difficulty setting to choose from, two of the game's best features are never able to be fully taken advantage of, and that's what makes The Technomancer disappointing.

Spiders fell just short of greatness with this one. Their most admirable effort to date is held back by last gen visuals, poor balancing, and technical issues. Their are also some design flaws like the one that locked out of completing one of my companion's quest threads because apparently you only have one of those going at once and there was no dialog option to go back and get it from them later on. Yet, this is still a genuinely good RPG. It's clear that player choice was the central focus in every aspect of its design and that's what drives people to play these kind of games in the first place. Spiders definitely needs to continue refining their technique, because if they learn their lessons here they could very become the genre's next household name.

7.5/10

The story takes us back to the cyberpunk universe known from the game Mars War Logs, where technology intersects with magic and warring factions fight for access to the most precious resource: water. Technomancers are genetically modified warriors with enormous political influence and are also guardians of ancient knowledge. In battle, they combine cutting-edge technology with supernatural power obtained through mutation, the source of which lies in the wisdom of their ancestors. Thanks to all this, they are seen as demigods in the eyes of society, but due to the widespread hatred of mutants, their presence can sometimes cause unexpected events.

We take on the role of one of the young and inexperienced Technomancers whose mission is to find and protect powerful artifacts from Earth, as they are the source of extremely valuable knowledge and technology. The game allows us to side with one of the six factions available. Each of them has strengths and weaknesses that affect the gameplay and the way we fulfill certain missions. The choices made during the game will affect the ending of the story.

The game's mechanics are very similar to what we could see in the first game. It utilizes a number of typical RPG elements such as the character development system, NPCs joining our team and an extensive crafting system. However, the gameplay has been modified and improved, especially in the aspects that received the most criticism from players in the first game. One of the most important changes is the variety of story-related quests, which have become much more extensive and enriched. The game offers an average of 30 hours of gameplay.

Uma tentativa de RPG

Technomancer no início me divertiu muito, achei o combate do jogo interessante e suas missões foram boas, de verdade, porém da metade do jogo pra lá ele vai ficando bem capenga e sua história perde muito a intensidade, ficando algo clichê, chato e entediante de se ler, esse jogo é um total ame ou odeie, e infelizmente eu só consegui odiar.

Missões desinteressantes

As missões principais do jogo que deviam ser de forte impacto, são as mais fracas e que quebram mais a diversão do jogo. Muito backtracking, nenhum fast travel, péssima seleção de diálogo, fez das missões de Technomancer serem enjoativas, suas recompensas das missões também não são lá grandes coisas, e a dificuldade em cada uma delas é totalmente desproporcional, uma hora você ta metendo bronca num chefe e na outra você sente que não progrediu nada, como se tivesse ainda no nivel 1 do personagem.

Mas mesmo no jardim mais sujo, há flores pra se olhar

Esse título tem sim problemas que fazem dele um jogo fraco, mas ele também tem pontos bons pra se observar e que me cativaram a continuar a gameplay quase até o fim do jogo, por exemplo a árvore de habilidades de combate, os poderes de raio que eu achei o máximo e o apelo que é jogar de Rogue nesse jogo, se tu pegar uma pistolinha boa da pra fazer a festa aqui.

As missões dos parceiros também são bem mais legais que as principais, e me lembrou até de um certo jogo amado.. as histórias por trás de cada personagemzinho faz deles serem algo mais completo, ta longe de serem vistos como seres humanos na perspectiva de jogador, mas se tornam mais completos e próximo de uma pessoa real, só senti falta de uns pensamentos mais únicos e originais ali.

Dê chance a ele, mesmo que não pareça legal

Eu odiei esse jogo, mas você pode gostar dele. Ele tem muitos elementos que o fazem ser um jogo interessante pra algumas pessoas, essa foi a minha primeira experiência com um RPG do estúdio Spiders, e não foi uma experiência muito boa, mas muita gente gosta dos RPGs deles e de verdade pode ser um tesouro achado pra você! Portanto, dê chance a esse jogo se estiver numa promoção que vale a pena, mas não vai com muita sede ao pote, se não tu pode acabar lambendo um pote vazio de chocolate.

I had a pretty good time with The Technomancer. You can see Spiders improving since Mars: War Logs, but there is still quite a bit of jank and room for iteration here.

Combat is fairly expressive, with three different stances you can take as well as Technomancy (electric magic) you can learn. They are all ostensibly good for different things and each has a skill tree you can level up, but I only used the defender stance and Technomancy throughout the whole game, which was definitely a supported approach. The other two stances felt awful in terms of movement and responsiveness to me (even defender took a bit of getting used to), but your mileage may vary.
Control and movement is only a slight step up from M:WL, but the increase in options makes it feel better to play. It does become repetitive by the end though, since most enemies are fairly straightforward and there isn't much here in terms of encounter design besides throwing a bunch of enemies in a room.

The world building here is strong and The Technomancer throws you into an interesting take on Mars full of corporations struggling for control, mutants, and electro-wizards. This is the reason to play this game. Spiders has a vision of Mars that is evocative and unique, tackled with a passion and inelegance that is endearing.
The story is fine and gets the job done of pulling you through the various locations in the world, but there are quite a few narrative stumbles, unfortunately. A lot of the events feel very forced and unexplained and numerous hard cuts to a new situation leave the player to fill in the blanks. This is par for the course with Spiders' writing style, I think, as this is carried over from M:WL and persists (much less so, however) in Greedfall.

The Technomancer has an extreme amount of content, unfortunately most of it is reused or extended by forced back-tracking. Most of the quests in the game end up with you running extreme distances to inconvenient travel points for very little reason. This is made worse by the fact that every one of these jaunts takes you through repetitive fights you have experienced ten or more times.
The back half is very unnecessary and drawn out -- it feels like they are trying to meet some expected length here and the game absolutely suffers for it.

I like The Technomancer a bit more than Mars: War Logs, but it doesn't appeal quite as much as Greedfall in terms of setting, narrative, or gameplay. I really like that Spiders has shown a clear path of improvement as they have continued making these sprawling, overly ambitious RPGs.
It is awesome to see a studio with such clear ambition and the will to keep building these flawed but, unique and entertaining experiences.

If you can look past some of the rough edges, The Technomancer is a really solid action RPG in a great setting.

The Technomancer is actually a sequel to a little known role playing game called Mars: War Logs by the same small French development studio Spiders. They have been specializing in RPGs for quite a few years now, nearly always pretty low budget, and of varying quality. I always thought Mars : War Logs was their best game, until I played this. It still has it's problems but if the phrase "diamond in the rough" ever applied to a game, this one is it for me.

Set on Mars in the distant future you play the role of Zachariah Mancer. He is a Technomancer, rare people born with the talent to control and throw around lightning. In this time Mars is ruled by large cities known as corporations that have been fighting each other for many years to the point where contact with earth, as well as certain industry and knowledge of technology have been lost over time. Technomancers are at the forefront of the fighting, Zachariah being a newly ordained Technomancer has been put into the Abundance army who have been in a long war with the corporation Hope. However things in the war are not the only thing he has to worry about as Abundance is slowly becoming a paranoid military state who don't trust Technomancers, even their own...

The story is solid enough though at the start I believe it could have been put across a lot better. A lot of information isn't always too clear about what is going on as there isn't always enough exposition or character development compared with other games of the genre. It doesn't help that near the start of the game I got a cutscene with a character I'd never met acting like we had then two hours later stumbled on the scene I was meant to see first. After a certain point in the game however things open up quite a lot and you get to learn more about both Mars and your companions, both of which I found really pretty interesting, if anything I wanted more information on the game world Spiders has created. The corporations and Technomancers are pretty cool ideas in themselves but having a faction of humans suffering from mutations due to Mars's radiation as well as plant and animal life originally brought from Earth that have mutated into dangerous looking monsters makes the planet an interesting place. You will however have to dig a lot of information about these things as well as other characters by talking to characters to get the most out of it but I think it's worth it.

Zachariah's journey will see him gain companions that both fight with him and help in other ways. These companions much like many western role playing games have their own story quests for you to complete by getting to know them. These quests are some of the best in the game as some of them intertwine with each other and all of them have a place in the world Spiders created either personally or politically. It is a shame the main quests aren't as well thought out to be honest.

In combat you have several companions but you only actually fight using Zachariah with two companions as back up controlled by the AI. I have seen many reviews complain about the combat but you know what? it's pretty solid though not great. You have three different combat styles to choose from which you can swap between at will in battle:

- The Warrior - uses a two handed staff for decent damage, a good dodge with area attacks.
- The Rogue - uses a knife and pistol, the least damage but good range, poison attacks and a great dodge.
- The Guardian - uses a mace and shield for high damage and blocking attacks but awful dodge.

Each style has it's strengths depending on what enemies you fight though it is possible to use just the one you're most comfortable with. Combat in this game can be pretty tough if you just mash attack over and over, enemies will dodge your strikes and deal punishing damage while attacking in groups. If you are the kind of player that enjoys more tactical fighting like dodging, using disrupting attacks to stagger enemies then the combat should not be a problem. Each fighting style has skill trees that you can slowly unlock as Zachariah levels up allowing you to customize your style with special attacks and abilities. Every weapon and piece of armour you get can also be customized by crafting to give them boosts in certain directions and all this equipment can also be sorted out for all your companions though you have no control over their level ups and abilities.

Early in the game though, especially in chapter one there is a steep learning curve. This chapter was badly designed in my opinion giving too much too fast, I ended up getting beaten up by large gangs before I had any companions or a handle on crafting gear which was quite frustrating. It really starts to bloom past that chapter though with new areas and quests. The problem is most of these quests lead you to the same areas over and over, the amount of backtracking you do in maybe 10 game maps is ridiculous over 40 hours, especially without a fast travel option. I suspect Spiders budget just wouldn't stretch any further which is a real shame as the cyberpunk Mars dystopia they created is really interesting if only we could see more of it.

The visuals to the game will not impress but they aren't that bad either, they feel a bit like a PlayStation 3 game that has been ported over to the PlayStation 4, my biggest gripe is that faces in conversations display no emotion at all, like everyone on Mars has extreme Botox. It runs relatively smoothly but there are still some judders and frame skips here and there which make me feel their game engine "silk" has been named ironically. The art style is pretty good though, some really nice city, character, clothing and monster designs but we need to see more of it. The voice acting is a mixed bag, I rather liked most of it but then I am mainly comparing it with Spiders last game Bound by Flame which had some of the worst voice acting I can remember in a game. Ever. So this is a hundred times better. The soundtrack is excellent however, composed by the same man who did Remember Me's soundtrack for those that played it.

In conclusion I think The Technomancer is a hard game to quantify, it's a game that is simply better than the sum of it's parts. It has a lot of flaws that hold it back from being truly amazing yet it is fun, with an original setting and some unique ideas. If you don't mind some low budget presentation and want to try something a little different from a small relatively unknown developer I highly recommend giving The Technomancer a try.

+ The Mars setting is great.
+ Companion quests are excellent, fit with the world.
+ Art and music are great.

- Main story isn't told too well.
- Chapter one is not designed very well.
- Insane amount of backtracking, no fast travel.
- Faces have almost no expression.