One section set on a sea base just looks flat out ridiculous, as you ascend the top of a stunning vista, gazing out over a sun-drenched sea and golden-kissed facility. Through your looping, you’ll travel to a handful of locations, each with its own style and jaw-dropping palette. Either way, Loopmancer is another to add to the catalog of “it looks freaking incredible”. Truly, I don’t think I’ve ever played an average looking cyberpunk game – maybe it’s the robotic rose tinted glasses or I’ve just not played the right (or… wrong?) games. There’s something about the cyberpunk aesthetic that just brings out the incredible quality of visual and graphic designers. I stopped reading them on my third loop and never looked back. Voice acting and lip-syncing issues certainly don’t help, and while there are plenty of notes and lore exposition documents to be found within the world, they come off as walls of text that slow the pace down and honestly, a few I read felt pretty superfluous. What’s here is perfectly serviceable and Zixu’s motivations are well established, but everything else from the antagonists to the end goal just feel too menial to justify having to replay multiple times. There are a couple of forks in the road but they’re too few to make it meaningful and the second choice can even be done where you do both options if you do them in the right order and within a time limit. After my second ending I couldn’t help but feel like the rest of the time wasn’t going to be especially enlightening, which doesn’t do much to incentivise you to keep playing. A single run that hits one of the multiple available endings will tell you the majority of what there is to know, with other endings only adding bite-sized extra chunks of context. Unlike the cream of the crop such as Hades or even 12 Minutes however, Loopmancer’s story is just a bit too bareboned to really justify multiple loops and decision-making. As this is a cyberpunk world, that means machinations from overly-powerful conglomerate corporations, seedy mob bosses and loser hackers who now have a means to be cool by hacking stuff. Having been in a car accident six months prior to the day he’s now repeating, his daughter has since passed away and his wife left paralysed, incurring his wrath for justice, truth and vengeance. Xiang isn’t just hoarse and tough-talking for the sake of it, he’s been through a pretty intensive time. Oh, and you can pet a cat to get a buff for the remainder of your loop, so you know, it’s game of the year automatically.Īs is now standard practice for the genre, each time you get a bit further and die, you piece a bit more of the story together. You begin the day completely fresh, able to wonder about the two rooms, inspect an evidence board and invest in upgrades with cores gathered from each run. The tutorial section has our grizzled detective Xiang Zixu meet an untimely end (which occurs abruptly if you don’t reach the… end… of the level) only to awake back in his apartment room bullet-hole free. Loopmancer has the unenviable job of following some of the pinnacles of the repetition-breeds-fun genre, so can that Cyberpunk aesthetic provide it a unique enough edge? Sharpen your katana and let’s start dissecting some prosthetics.įrom the off, Loopmancer wears its inspirations openly and plainly. There’s a very fine line to tread between repetition for development, and repetition that descends into mind-numbing disinterest. Now, I will say that while I’m somewhat of a fan of the idea of loop-based video games, I’ve not been blown away by the execution. Yet, no upcoming genre is complete with someone taking a stab at it with a cyberpunk style and neon-glistened sheen. All of them have been game of the year contenders for one category or another, so much like any popular premise, it’s becoming a focus for emulation in search of similar success. Over the past year or two, we’ve been treated to a stylish FPS (Deathloop), a disturbing story-based experience (12 Minutes), a frenetic 3rd person shooter (Returnal) and a game everyone loved except for me (Outer Wilds… not sorry). The concept of loop based narrative experiences is fast approaching saturation in the gaming space, it would seem anyway. Players play as a detective who comes back to life after an unexpected death, and battle in this lifelike and futuristic city of the east.Delivering hack & slash action in a beautiful Cyberpunk world, does Loopmancer live up to the best of the genre? The Finger Guns Review: Loopmancer is a 3D platformer roguelite action game with realistic graphics that takes place in a cyberpunk universe.
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