I am struggling to fall in love with The Technomancer. Well, not even something as strong as love – I can’t even fall in “like” with it. I am ten hours into my exploration of a future Mars and I am not looking forward to the next ten.
The Technomancer tries to do many things at once, yet never once seems to do any of them adequately. It attempts to tell a sprawling, dystopian story without any verve, it attempts to ape the combat system of the Arkham series while also forgetting the fun factor, and, worst of all, it fails to make you connect with the protagonist in any way.
Playing as Zachariah Mancer, who also goes by Forgettable Main Character #127272 on the weekends, you’re tasked with…well, I’m not even sure. I have to be honest here, the sheer density of the lore of The Technomancer has bested me already – throughout my time with Spiders’ newest game, I haven’t really been aware of why I’m doing what I’m doing, why I have to kill a bunch of deserters, why any of it matters. The story starts off well, showing a colonised Mars playing host to a war between the corporations and the everyman over precious water supplies, but it quickly turns flat. It also doesn’t help that it shares the same universe as Mars: War Logs, a relatively obscure PC game. There’s a creative spark missing in the writing that’s vital to the games that The Technomancer has been routinely compared to.
Of those comparisons, The Witcher and Mass Effect are the most accurate, particularly the latter. As brutal as it might be to say, The Technomancer plays like the original Mass Effect in pre-alpha. The 2007 game would hold up very well against one that is almost a decade its junior if you were to put them side-by-side. The Technomancer seems to so desperately want to be a Bioware game that it forgets to be its own.
Where The Technomancer falls down most is in its combat. A game can be the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen with no comprehensible story, but if the gameplay is decent enough, it gets a pass. No such luck with The Technomancer. It has some of the sloppiest, most punishing, and least fun combat of any game I have played in a long time. Take on more than one thug at a time and you can expect pain, especially when there is an enemy taking potshots at you with guns from afar, taking off a quarter of your health with every shot. It doesn’t help that Zachariah, despite being lauded by his peers and masters as a powerful warrior, is about as handy in a fight as a wet kitten. Every hit landed on an enemy feels like you’re gently stroking their hair, while every hit in return is as if you’ve been shot by a cannonball. And this is on Normal difficulty.
Technomancy, what sets Zachariah apart from regular people, is almost pointless. You basically tickle enemies with it; there’s almost no point to using them. As 90% of all fights consist of Zachariah pirouetting around to avoid the constant imbalance of opposition and that the technomancy animations take up to three seconds, it’s not worth the risk. To give Spiders credit, they have given the player four different fighting styles to choose from: Rogue (stealth), Technomancer (zap zap), Guardian (shield), and Warrior (big staff). I spent most of time playing as a Warrior and I imagine most others will – it gives you the least chance of being murdered within ten seconds.
Away from combat, The Technomancer possesses all the staples of an RPG with depth: crafting; weapon and armor upgrades; skill trees; conversation options and so on. All of these are implemented fairly well, but progress is spectacularly slow. Even though I am hours in, I still have basic armour, next to no progress on the skill tree, and the most rudimentary of weaponry. Great RPGs reward the player with a tangible sense of progress. The Technomancer does not.
Graphically, The Technomancer is competent on PS4, but only just. It doesn’t look like it would challenge the PS3 in truth. Animations are basic, particularly where conversation is concerned – only characters’ mouths move, making it look like a strange exercise in experimental art at times. Everything just has a very dull edge to it, which is a far cry from the flashy, refined marketing materials that have been following the game. The Technomancer is murky and nothing to look at at the best of times, downright ugly at others.
For a first impressions piece, this one is getting away from me. I could sit here and type up a thousand more words on The Technomancer, but I won’t, just in case there’s something that grabs me over the next ten hours and shows me what a judgmental arsehole I’ve been.
Not counting on it, though. Check back for the full review in a couple of days.
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