Cloudpunk xbox1/5/2024 ![]() ![]() To make it even worse, whenever you get close to…well, anything, you find out that the people and the world are all blocky and Lego-like. Oddly, the map - which is very confusing and very useless - makes it seem like Cloudpunk (the city, not the game) is brimming with points of interest, but when you investigate further you quickly realize that it’s mainly a whole lot of nothing. There’s sort of some story reasons for that - which I’ll get to in a moment - and the game is definitely going for a certain atmosphere, but more often than not, it feels like the developers created a city and forgot to fill it with people. On top of that, the city is pretty empty, so it all feels pretty desolate. On the one hand, the game takes place at night, so the darkness makes a bit of sense, but at the same time, the way it’s presented, everything just looks kind of foggy and dull. As you’re doing this, the world is mostly shrouded in darkness, and you can barely see a few buildings ahead of you. Cloudpunk is set in a sprawling city full of skyscrapers in a very literal sense of the world, and you pilot around your flying car around the eponymous city, making deliveries. You’ve just got to be okay with making a couple of pretty big allowances.įirst, you need to forgive graphics that give off pretty heavy “early days of 3D gaming” vibes. This is definitely a good foundation for Ion Lands to build upon, if it ever decides to revisit this world, which they absolutely should.Cloudpunk is probably worth checking out. With a little polish and a stronger reason to exist and explore the world, Cloudpunk could have been something far greater. The narrative, however, is just not strong enough to disguise the relatively tedious A-to-B fetch quest gameplay (well, it’s more deliver than fetch, but you get my point). Nivalis is such a fantastically realised world, one full of wonder, and the score that accompanies it makes you feel like you’re in some badass cyberpunk thriller. How I was able to get through to the end of Cloudpunk before it completely imploded is beyond me, but I did… somehow!Ĭloudpunk represents a bit of a missed opportunity. It was a particularly head-scratching moment when one character told me of another character’s death… as he was stood next to him. The game is incredibly buggy as well, with achievements that just straight up don’t work and a frame-rate that is far from stable but more worryingly, the further you get into the game, the more the game just gets straight up confused, making me go through dialogue and re-issuing quests that I’d already completed hours ago. When it comes to pacing, though, it’s all over the place, like sitting in your HOVA (your flying car) while listening to five minutes of exposition dialogue, before the game tells you where to go or getting to your destination far too quickly and then having to wait while you finish your conversation. On the design side, it’s hard to not be completely baffled by the fact there’s no invert option, and no save or exit game options (it just saves in the background). They’re tropes, clichés, and dull as dishwater, while the overall story just isn’t that gripping at all.Ĭloudpunk also has some bizarre design and pacing issues peppered throughout. Yes, Cloudpunk is effectively an exploration game, going from point A to point B, meeting characters, and discovering new locations, but the game’s main issue is that the narrative – and the characters written into the world – are just not all that interesting. That, unfortunately, is where my love for Cloudpunk ends, because from a gameplay perspective, things get incredibly repetitive and tedious very quickly. Mixed with a fantastic voxel art world, it’s easy to fall completely in love with the world that Ion Lands has created. With some fantastic Blade Runner-esque vibes from composer Harry Critchley. Throughout the game’s relatively lengthy campaign, you’ll explore all that Nivalis has to offer, dropping off dodgy packages to a whole host of nefarious characters. And you know what? It is, but also, it isn’t.Ĭloudpunk sees you jump into the shoes of Rania, a young woman from the countryside, who makes her way to the megacity of Nivalis to work for eponymous illegal delivery firm, Cloudpunk. Cloudpunk, a 3D narrative driven exploration game should be right up my alley, then. The flying cars, the ramen bars, the cities above the clouds, the neon-soaked skylines, the ridiculously over-sized advertising. There’s just something about cyberpunk environments that I can’t get enough of.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |