The Technomancer

This game apparently has an issue where it will not start with more than 4 CPUs enabled. The fact that it's still being sold, with neither a fix nor a warning, in a world where an 8-core CPU is not particularly impressive, is entirely unacceptable to me. Seriously shoddy work...

After finished The Witcher 3, I can't remembered I enjoyed any game at all. Not until I tried to play The Technomancer, the story is not as good as the Witcher series, but it has moral choice, don't know yet it will has impact to the storyline or not. The fight is better than the witcher somehow. The map is way smaller than the Witcher 3. This is my first review ever and English is not my native language so it takes hour to write this review just to show my appreciation. I hope is not to late. Please give it a try and remembered always buy drm-free game!

Absolute jank, not until after installing and having it crash back to desktop repeatedly do you find that GoG advises you go into your Bios settings and limit the number of cores your CPU is using. This along with the disclaimer that if you brick your system playing about with this you're on your own. I try to support GoG as much as possible and have bought stuff that isn't that good or doesn't run well without some messing, but a game made in 2016 you take it as a given it will at least run.

On one hand, the level design is pure crap, enemy respawn is abnormally high and since the game world is not that large, you're going to do a lot of backtracking. A lot. I've seen more of Ophir's tunnels than my living room during the quarantine. That's a problem seen in the prequel, Mars Wars Logs that carries out here to a much wider level. If Technomancer has 20h or so of gameplay, you're going to spend at least 8h beating the same enemies again and again and again. You canimagine how frustrating that is. The combat doesn't help, although it is varied and promising at start (there are three stances and 4 classes of progression, which you can mix), it does gets old and repetitive fast. The level progression is also pretty slow. On the other hand, the quest design is surprisingly good and there a lot of side missions with multiple paths to solve them and creative ways to approach, something very positive on a Indie/double A western rpg. Plus, the world building is superb. For me, its the strongest point, if I've already enjoyed the authoritarian martian dystopia of Mars Wars Logs, here the mythology dives deeper, renewing old tropes and bringing real solid elements to the mix. Imagine roleplaying a jedi knight on a fascist regime: you've ethics, a heart in the right place, but everything around you sucks. The first 7 hours or so are very grimmy, since you feel the weight of being actually opressed and being unable to react. This leads us to the story which is pretty serviceable and makes good use of the amazing original world. The pessimistic ending evokes a John Carpenter's nihilistic atmosphere that brings maturity to the table. And at last, all the five companions are pretty vivid and interesting with backstories that revolves along the main plot. The amount of interaction with the companions is above the expected: they are pretty chatty throughout the entire game, be it on the missions or in the cutscenes triggered when you dislocate through the larger areas.

I've just completed my first playthrough and I have mixed feelings. After first two hour into the game I was absolutely amazed, seeing three different combat styles, reputations and karma system and moral choices in the first missions, I was expecting quite a complex game with deep storytelling. In general I do feel a bit dissapointed for those expectations wasn't exactly met, but still I've had a lot of fun following the story. To summarise my experience: Pros: + three combat styles to choose from, two of them can easily be maxed during one playthrough, all feeling equally fun to play, combat itself is not difficult to master + interesting crafting concentraiting on upgrading gear rather than making it from scratch + intersting story and lots of lore to find + good (mostly) companion stories, with interesting twist here and there (Scott, looking at you) + enemies' difficulty scale lategame Cons: - storytelling. It started out good, but the depth I was expecting after first hours wasn't there till the end, actually the closer to the grand finale the more shallow and rushed it felt. I do play for story, so I pay attention to dialogs and lore, but I've been confused more than once with what the quests offered. -backtracking. It was acceptable early, but the last act of the game is just running back and forth between the same people and places, killing the same groups of enemies over and over again, as they respawn fast, sometimes you run from A to B only for an NPC to tell you now you have to go back to A adn then come back to him... Sadly for me the horible backtracking, together with increasing shallowness, made me to rush to the end just to see the end of the story, skipping side quests and feeling more and more annoyed. Can't say the final boss felt in place. Overall though, if you can grab this game on a sale, don't hesitate, for the gameplay is fun and story itself is definitely worth experiencing!