Starting with the basics: the soundtrack to Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is incredible. It does so much heavy lifting in this game, you'd think it would have back problems. I would often just stay on the menu screen for 5 minutes upon booting the game just because even that music is killer. The cel-shaded graphics are solid, the level design is pretty straightforward and evocative, and the characters have some nice personality. The gameplay loop is a bit shallow, but the combos and challenges are just snappy enough to hold your attention through to the end. There's not a lot of combo moves, but jumps, boosts and manuals are plenty to keep you gripped as the level design begins to encourage insane airborne maneuvers that truly got my adrenaline pumping. The only significant criticism I have is that the end boss is pretty poorly designed. It locks your perspective and forces you to make blind jumps in 3D space while the camera is locked. The game had briefly locked perspective in previous sections, but it was done sparingly and never got in my way quite like the final boss. Also, for a game as stylish as this, I think more character design options would have been dope. All in all, I hope that the developers make Bomb Rush Cyberfunk 2 with a bigger budget in the future. A soundtrack of this caliber with deeper gameplay would be a contender in my eyes for the greatest game ever made. As it stands, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is "merely" a good game with one of the best soundtracks ever created.
Do you like fantastical steampunk aesthetics? Do you like supply chain management? Do you like city builders? If you said yes, this game might be for you. The core gameplay loop is surprisingly addictive: you settle an unexplored territory with your intrepid woodland settlers, attempting to complete enough quests for the Queen before her patience runs thin. Along the way, you'll have to gather resources, process them into usable items, and explore the shrouded glades for more resources to collect. Oh, and the yearly storm. Don't forget about the yearly storms where your city gets stress tested. Initially, the mechanics of the game might seem a bit obtuse beyond resource collection. You'll often have to make choices about what kind of town you'd like to build with incomplete knowledge of what the randomly-generated map has to offer, adjusting your supply lines on the fly. However, while I was learning the mechanics, the game's lore and "rainpunk" art design really helped keep me hooked. Once you understand trading and selecting which resources will be used in production, the game is yours. My main criticism of this game is that I wish there was more interaction with your prior settlements. Currently, you can send resources to them for currency, but I'm not sure if there's any rhyme or reason to the resources that they demand. It would be extremely cool to have prior choices in your settlements more directly impact future settlements. It can be a bummer that you don't really get to experience your settlement after you've thoroughly built it out and have a great supply chain going. On the other hand, being forced to start from scratch with a new set of challenges once your original settlement essentially begins to run itself is addicting. You are settlers from the Smoldering City, and the Great Blightstorm is coming to wipe the world clean -- there will be no respite from the rain unless your plucky explorers find a way to end the 25-year cycle of destruction.
If this game looks interesting to you, pick it up. I don't think you'll be disappointed, but you should know what to expect going into it. "What came before the big bang?" The answer, clearly, is a jazzy noir adventure myth about love, regret, and the isolation of time. As you play through the game, the writers will give you precious little to go on other than abstraction. For me, that's alright; I don't mind a pastiche of images and sounds that try to convey feeling rather than concrete narrative. It can be jarring, though, to expect a more traditional noir story wrapped in pretty art and instead receive a trippy, existential descent with few straightforward answers to your questions. The game itself is more of an interactive graphic adventure. The puzzles are shallow and basic, but the design keeps things from getting too tedious. At the end of the day, I'll take too easy over too difficult any day of the week. There is nothing worse than a good-looking puzzler that is too obtuse to keep your attention. At the end of the day, I don't think this game fully succeeded at what it tried to do. The gameplay is a bit too shallow to warrant a second playthrough, and the story is a bit too loose and inhuman to hook me in for another ride. However, the story is so abstract that a multiple playthroughs would definitely be required to fully understand the themes buried underneath. That's not to say it doesn't warrant the experience, though. There were a few moments when the game tangled its mystery plot with a sci-fi vision that truly took my breath away. If you've come this far and nothing yet has turned you off, give it a go.
As some have pointed out, this game definitely unlocks that mindset of the Sonic games, thinking quick and making decisions as you parkour and freerun around a corrupt, corporate police state. On paper, I love this game and its concept art. Level design is pretty good, too! However, this game is made by DICE. Now, I quite like a few Battlefield games but in a game about freerunning, I shouldn't move like a Battlefield game. Running is clunky and doesn't feel smooth at all. Button input is laggy. Collision detection can be frustrating (e.g. falling through a pipe unless hitting the right part of the pipe). Combat is infamously bad and imprecise. I found the story to range from alright to dull. It didn't hinder the game at all, though and you may very well find it good. It's definitely not the focus. Overall, this game is a good middle-of-the-road game to take your mind off things. It keeps your mind moving and though the control may be too jagged for a game of its genre, I still found enjoyment throughout. Catch this on sale if you want to satisfy an urge for a parkour game.
Seeing other reviews, I'm relieved that I'm not the only one suffering performance issues. This game drops frames HARD, especially in the open world. If you can play a game at 20-30 FPS , these issues will most likely not be a problem, but don't expect anything over 30 FPS. However, visuals really are where this game falters hard for me. Nothing has changed since Saints Row 3. The graphics are exactly the same after 6 years which isn't the bad part, to be honest. The bad part is that the game map is exactly the same: Steelport. The alien infrastructure is nowhere near enough to hide the fact that Steelport is still Steelport. The narrative makes the Steelport you occupy even more bland. With the new powers that allow you to jump over buildings, glide across the city, and run up walls, a bland, tired city is massively disappointing. Unfortunately, the game takes another hit from me, though this one isn't very fair. I was a younger person when SR3 came out, so fewer of the jokes from SR4 landed well and didn't feel as subversive as it did 6 years ago. But, there are still some comedic gems in there, and the dialogue can actually be pretty riveting at times. The gameplay is a mixed bag. I actually quite like a lot of the superpowers. The upgrades make it the game ridiculously fun, and still somewhat of a challenge (play this on Hardcore if you want any challenge at all). People talk a lot about how cars are made obsolete by the supersprint, but late-game, guns become obsolete too. Superpowers are just that strong, especially when every enemy is an unsatisfying bullet sponge. Still, it is hard to overstate just how much FUN the powers can be. Also, the new health pick-up system I found to be a definite improvement over health regen, and enemy mobs, though less diverse, are a bit more fun to beat than in SR3. The campaign has a few problems, but nothing terrible. Perhaps a bit tedious, but the main story remains just as comical and exuberant as SR3. Solid, but a letdown.
Waking Mars is a puzzler that has some elements that work, and some that put me off. The characters are likable and well-voice acted for the most part, while the robot character, although the cliche "I DON'T UNDERSTAND THIS "EMOTION" YOU HUMANS SPEAK OF YET I'M CUTE," is used throughout. Story is great and well-written. The visuals are original and real nice, yet can feel a little subpar during puzzles that take a while as everything begins to pasted over a background, which isn't always bad, but gets old when you've been looking at the same background for a while. The puzzles and gameplay feel weird however. The concept is wonderful: create a vibrant ecosystem filled with imaginative martian organisms. It works and it doesn't. You have a limited amount of seeds and ways to get the seeds back, thus making the puzzles almost feel like you can get stuck and have to reload, or travel back a few levels to get more seeds. It feels like it punishes you for trying. Succeeding at the puzzles doesn't give much satisfaction, as sometimes it's solved on shaky "I don't think I'm doing this right," pretenses. The herding AI creatures can be fun, yet hilariously frustrating as they leap to their death. The levels within the puzzles always feel cool to adventure through, yet tough to figure out how the devs would like you to solve them. Overall, Waking Mars, although can make the player feel lost and stuck at times, is a fine game.
Either this game was rushed, or took a misstep somewhere. There are some great mechanics in this game that just aren't fleshed out properly. The combat is wonderful, or could be if: A. It was used more B. It was more challenging C. It was made less buggy Most of the mechanics can be described as such. From the property management, to the the financing and trading, to the very annoying "Move from scenario A to B" rather than a complete overworld. Perhaps this game will be remade or spiritually succeeded in the future.
