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.
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.
2 Comments
Yeah, I was pretty done with the game by the third major city they send you to and it is mostly backtracking errands that hardly make sense from that point on.
I was impressed that they manage to make the "pick the ending you want" moment (which is always very contrived) feel motivated and reasonable in a way that, for instance, Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution don't.
I was impressed that they manage to make the "pick the ending you want" moment (which is always very contrived) feel motivated and reasonable in a way that, for instance, Mass Effect 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution don't.
FallenGrace
1 year ago