The Technomancer

Unfortunately this game fails at the one thing it should be good at: Making you feel like a mighty Technomancer. Note also that the screenshots above are almost exclusively cutscenes. Unlike what the pictures suggest, you play in third person with the camera behind and above. For an RPG, the skill tree is minimalistic with the Technomancer skill options being especially poor. In a world with automatic guns, your primary attack skill is to deliver an electric shock at short range that does about as much damage as a melee attack but comes with a long cooldown time. The game borrows ideas (like arena fights or potential love interests) from many great titles like KOTOR et al, but ultimately fails to meet their immersion and depth due to shallow characters, mediocre writing, unengaging factions, cookie cutter good vs. evil reputation system, extremely unbalanced fights, clunky controls, unconvincing NPCs, poor AI with your companions being little more than punching bags that keep blocking your way and your enemies always charging you in a straight line. All in all this game is not great, but not bad either. It has its moments and all the ingredients for a great RPG but unfortunately stops short of "doing it right".

Game looks promising, but the problem of requiring system to run in no more than 4 CPU cores is just obsurd. Run it and you will find yourself have to manually limit the number of your CPU cores to run this game, it's not too much of a click work but it's not worth the hassle.

The progress is absolutely visible between Technomancer and Mars: War Logs. However, the said progress only relates to the narrative and amount of locations. The core gameplay remains the same, with painful and annoying combat experience. Even if easily exploited (mine spam), the long story recycling the same locations with multiple respawning enemies (you will have the same encounters in exact same rooms over and over again when doing different quests), makes it barely tolerable and I had been on a verge of dropping the game altogether. The gameplay does not evolve anywhere from a midway of the second Act. On Extreme difficulty I didn't change any equipment piece or used any new skill. It boils down to a handful set pieces of combat encounters repeated throughout the whole game with different cut scenes and dialogues inbetween. The rocky and sometimes tiring journey, however, is worth for the ending alone, where the best element of the franchise peaks. The world building and a narrative broad perspective makes the Technomancer's world appealing and worth the hassle. If the developer decides to pull this franchise further down the road, they have a strong base for it. Some better writers would be recommended, though. The main quests more often than not felt like a drag and a filler, and the companions and their relations are blandly executed, even if the ideas behind them are good. A guilty pleasure with potential for something much better.

I bought several of Spiders older games after enjoying Greedfall. The Technomancer had an interesting story, fun quests, and no major bugs. It took me around37 hours to finish the main quest and almost all side quests so it was a bit short for an rpg, but a good value for the money. It was not as good as Greedfall but was better than Bound by Flame. A good solid rpg.

I played the game from start to finish (good karma), it was the first time I played this game. I finished it just a couple of hours ago for my Twitch channel. I played it at 1080p windowed mode on a Windows 10 desktop PC. The specs of the PC are i7-5960X (8C 16T), GTX 1660 Super, 64GB RAM, PCIE SSD). Native desktop resolution of 2560x1440. I experienced zero crashes and zero noticeable faults other than an occasional lower than average framerate in some occasions which while there did not affect the game at all as they never happened during action. It took me 10 sessions of an average of about 4 hours each. Normal difficulty, though I admit I don't remember if I picked one at all. The game is an action rpg, with open world mechanics though not to the extend of say the Fallout games. Most of the game takes place in "closed worlds", for example a large city, or smaller other places. The travel between those places is done with a fast travel mechanic vaguely similar to the wagon in Skyrim. When you are inside one of those maps (like a city), depending on the size of it, there can be multiple levels within in it which are treated as different maps. You can travel between them with riding elevators or doorways. Within each map you can travel on foot. A lot. I am guessing about 25% of the game was me walking from place to place within a map. The fights are fun, with variety in options (3 different stances with weapons and skills to go you can pick on the fly) and one which is always available together with your chosen one. Good variety of weapons and armor to find, purchase and upgrade. Still, this is not Skyrim. Good story, a ton of missions (main and side), optional missions, decisions affecting the story, etc. Good music, good acting, good graphics. Good story. Good game. The main 2 negatives, tons of walking and rotating mini maps which makes it impossible to not also use the main map. No compass hurts too. Worth playing.