A cyberpunk ninja parkour action platformer, that never let me enjoy it for very long. You will navigate to the end of each stage through as combination of running, dashing, sliding, wall running, firing a hook into valid spots, attacking with your sword, blocking or deflecting enemy shots, and making use of a few stage gimmicks and abilities. A game where, if you are typically good at games like I am, you will probably die anywhere from 10-50 times a level while feeling like maybe 1/4-1/5 of those were actually your fault.
You never have quite as much control of yourself as you should in a game like this and the game seems to struggle with handling momentum of your moves or when doing things like using fans to propel you. You can potentially use the game's poor upgrade system that has you putting a small number of abilities enhancements into a slowly expanding grid in a way that is like trying to maneuver Tetris blocks of different sizes so that you can fit the most skills you want. Through this you can gain additional dashes you can use one after the other before waiting for them to charge, but you can't use multiple in the air for some reason. When you dash in the air you can hold the button to slow time down and maneuver left or right but not in any other direction and you will always have to dash when you let go, making what the game seems to want you to use that skill for more awkward than it has to be. You will constantly stick to walls while wall running (as you can basically grab any surface not just ones that are presented as a path forward) which lead to some both funny and ridiculous situation where I was desperately trying to fall down to attack enemies below me while trying to fight my character to get off the damn walls. At times there are fan like jumping platforms that seem to throw you random distances, I'd go over the same one in seemingly the same way only to completely miss a platform, to be thrown directly on a platform, to almost make it and need an air dash to land, or to be thrown over the place you are meant to land.
You gain four combat abilities as you play that can be used as you charge up a focus meter. One that allows you to do a long dash through enemies, killing ones that are in a row. Never bothered to use it. A push back move that can also push back enemy shots, since I can already parry I never bothered to use it. A ranged wave sword attack that seems like the only really useful thing you get, never used it. And at the very end of the game a move to hack an enemy to get them to attack their allies, tended to just get them killed after they got one kill so seemed weaker than the first and third ability so I never used it (not that I had much time to). The enemies are never really challenging so I just didn't see a reason for them, even less so with potentially long focus build time. Your upgrade blocks are so limited in what you can actually take it seemed like a waste to gain any bonuses to these over the ability to parry enemy shots and to dash more often.
The game can be really bad at letting you know where to go. Not properly lighting things or just expecting you to expect some random hookable spot to appear. There were dozens of times where I followed a clear path laid out through whatever traps and enemies, only to end up jumping off a cliff or back down to an earlier section because any guiding elements just stopped. Oh, you didn't know to look up and left at the hookable spot that was suddenly going to appear as you jumped, well fuck you.
It looks fine, it is a pretty generic setting with the usual terrible graffiti everywhere with messages like, "open your eyes", "wake up". With the generic setting comes a generic story of evil scientist who wants to turn people into robot abominations taking over society from a megalomaniac, now an AI in your head, that views everyone as tools to preserve society to live on in the place he built to preserve humanity from the destroyed outside world.
Horrible tedious and momentum killing VR segments that partly serve as info dump but are mostly done to include mediocre poorly thought out puzzles, until the end of the game where the VR world suddenly plays like a normal running sequence and due to lack of enemies is probably one of the better parts of the game.
Issues running in DirectX 12 mode which is required for ray tracing, even in DirectX11 it seemed to have trouble starting.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1396948301992185856
You never have quite as much control of yourself as you should in a game like this and the game seems to struggle with handling momentum of your moves or when doing things like using fans to propel you. You can potentially use the game's poor upgrade system that has you putting a small number of abilities enhancements into a slowly expanding grid in a way that is like trying to maneuver Tetris blocks of different sizes so that you can fit the most skills you want. Through this you can gain additional dashes you can use one after the other before waiting for them to charge, but you can't use multiple in the air for some reason. When you dash in the air you can hold the button to slow time down and maneuver left or right but not in any other direction and you will always have to dash when you let go, making what the game seems to want you to use that skill for more awkward than it has to be. You will constantly stick to walls while wall running (as you can basically grab any surface not just ones that are presented as a path forward) which lead to some both funny and ridiculous situation where I was desperately trying to fall down to attack enemies below me while trying to fight my character to get off the damn walls. At times there are fan like jumping platforms that seem to throw you random distances, I'd go over the same one in seemingly the same way only to completely miss a platform, to be thrown directly on a platform, to almost make it and need an air dash to land, or to be thrown over the place you are meant to land.
You gain four combat abilities as you play that can be used as you charge up a focus meter. One that allows you to do a long dash through enemies, killing ones that are in a row. Never bothered to use it. A push back move that can also push back enemy shots, since I can already parry I never bothered to use it. A ranged wave sword attack that seems like the only really useful thing you get, never used it. And at the very end of the game a move to hack an enemy to get them to attack their allies, tended to just get them killed after they got one kill so seemed weaker than the first and third ability so I never used it (not that I had much time to). The enemies are never really challenging so I just didn't see a reason for them, even less so with potentially long focus build time. Your upgrade blocks are so limited in what you can actually take it seemed like a waste to gain any bonuses to these over the ability to parry enemy shots and to dash more often.
The game can be really bad at letting you know where to go. Not properly lighting things or just expecting you to expect some random hookable spot to appear. There were dozens of times where I followed a clear path laid out through whatever traps and enemies, only to end up jumping off a cliff or back down to an earlier section because any guiding elements just stopped. Oh, you didn't know to look up and left at the hookable spot that was suddenly going to appear as you jumped, well fuck you.
It looks fine, it is a pretty generic setting with the usual terrible graffiti everywhere with messages like, "open your eyes", "wake up". With the generic setting comes a generic story of evil scientist who wants to turn people into robot abominations taking over society from a megalomaniac, now an AI in your head, that views everyone as tools to preserve society to live on in the place he built to preserve humanity from the destroyed outside world.
Horrible tedious and momentum killing VR segments that partly serve as info dump but are mostly done to include mediocre poorly thought out puzzles, until the end of the game where the VR world suddenly plays like a normal running sequence and due to lack of enemies is probably one of the better parts of the game.
Issues running in DirectX 12 mode which is required for ray tracing, even in DirectX11 it seemed to have trouble starting.
Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1396948301992185856