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Cloudpunk length7/1/2023 ![]() ![]() Honestly, if it weren't for the quality of the artwork, story and character acting I would have given up on this very rapidly. My favourite is an early side quest where the aim is to convince a senile elevator AI that calls itself Gorgothoa that it is not, in fact, devouring humans and excreting their corpses but simply delivering them to another floor. Little vignettes into life in Nivalis, a few recurring characters (one of which I took great pleasure in abandoning to their death) and some genuinely funny bits. The sole exception to this odd pointlessness of the open world is the vast array of side quests that can be found. You can repair, refuel or upgrade your car a small amount, buy useless items for your character, buy food that does nothing, or buy cosmetic upgrades to your flat that you don't actually spend any time in. In fact the whole money aspect adds very little to anything. An open world that contains very little of actual value. The whole world, then, feels alive yet superfluous. There's only one mission that requires the user to actively explore for any length and only for one type of item. All of the purchasable items are cosmetic at best, and some don't even show up in the game world. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much reason to do so. The player is free to go wherever they want, buy goods from merchants, drugs from dealers, food from street vendors or restaurant owners. Go through teleportation doors and up and down lifts to navigate the 3D world using a 2D map. The rest is spent walking around the maze-like structures of Nivalis. But once you get the hang of it it's pretty fun. The other traffic also makes no attempt to avoid you so if you enter a busy intersection, expect to me rammed from all sides. Controlling the car is fun but the controls are weird. Much of the game is spent piloting your HOVA, a flying car that makes use of the various induction loop expressways of Nivalis. Unfortunately the gameplay shown in the Switch trailer is from the PC version so the actual game is somewhat disappointing in comparison. The Switch port even has very degraded graphics, with a much reduced draw distance and simplified environmental effects. However, it's clear it relies too much on current gen grunt and not enough on efficient coding because it drops frames like no tomorrow, including one particular case where it froze for so long I failed a time critical mission. Unfortunately the gameplay shown in the Switch trailer is from the PC version so the actual game is … More The rain, the soundtrack, the ambient sounds and the neon lights genuinely sell the city as the grim, derelict dystopia it really is. Like viewing a dystopian cyberpunk future through pixelating lenses. I've never been a fan of the voxel aesthetic but it somehow works for this. The atmosphere of the game is really good. There is some great humour among the grimness and sympathetic characters that add to the feeling of the thing. ![]() The characters are interesting, the voice acting is great (although the standard niggle of names being pronounced differently by various people at various times exists). The player character is Rania, an outsider to the towering vertical city of Nivalis, and this entire game spans only a single night, her first shift working as a delivery driver for the semi-legal courier Cloudpunk. A narrative driven adventure that's far more linear than it likes to think. That should hopefully set the scene of how engrossed I was in this game, because the rest of the review is gonna sound a bit negative.Ĭloudpunk is a walking simulator, of sorts. ![]() I picked up Cloudpunk on its Switch release day and played nothing else on any platform until I completed the story.
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