The Technomancer

There’s no number or hint in the title, but The Technomancer is a follow-up to developer Spiders’ poorly received 2013 RPG, Mars: War Logs. The Technomancer takes place amidst the same war between dystopian corporations on a richly realized vision of the red planet. You control the bland Zachariah Mancer, a newly minted Technomancer (read: brooding cyberpunk Jedi) caught in the middle of a struggle between the army and the secret police of the Abundance corporation. Zach has some cool moments throughout the story, but never quite gets to shine as a character. He’s too much of a blank-slate protagonist, and where superior RPGs would allow you to mold such a persona through roleplaying, The Technomancer’s dialogue choices usually boil down to, “Do I have the right non-combat skills to progress this quest without fighting?” or “Should I accept a mission from this person based on what I know about them?” rather than any genuine character-building or world-affecting decision making. There is a morality system that allows you to adopt a Batman-esque code against killing, but its effects are rarely visible on the story or gameplay.

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The Martian setting and background and the environments used to introduce you to them are definitely the high points of this journey. From the monolithic, utilitarian metropolis of Ophir to the vibrant, rugged, Arabian Nights-esque merchant city of Noctis, the distinct cultural styles and small, convincing details really do a hell of a job bringing Mars to life.

“ The story is presented without flourish or a true sense of stakes and tension.

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It’s easy to brush off rough acting and presentation if it’s merely a crusty layer on top of an otherwise entertaining game, but peeling back the surface of The Technomancer reveals something worse underneath. The combat may be fun to watch, with exciting melee animations and a variety of flashy abilities, but it’s clunky to control at the best of times and borderline intolerable at the worst. I would really be relieved and unsurprised to find that a programmer misplaced some decimal points, because that seems legitimately more plausible than the idea that this is really how battles were meant to feel.

“ It breaks the illusion that Technomancers are supposed to be mystical heroes.

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Imagine if you took the Batman: Arkham games, made Batman significantly weaker and less durable than every single mook the Joker throws at him, lifted the restriction on how many enemies can attack him simultaneously, and removed the excellent UI prompts that allow the Caped Crusader to react quickly to danger, flipping and dodging heroically around the battlefield while looking like a badass. That’s basically what almost every fight feels like in The Technomancer.

There’s also the matter of firearms. A lot of enemies carry them, and some of them even have fully automatic variants that your character can’t even equip. They do loads of damage and can allow upwards of three or four enemies to plink away at your health from a safe distance while you’re engaged with their buddies. You won’t get any prompt that you’re about to be fired upon, and since one or more shooters may be off-screen at any given time, it’s fairly common to die to gunfire in the middle of a brawl before you even know what happened. Gunmen don’t even seem to have any weaknesses; you can’t simply close on them and take them out quickly before engaging the rest of an enemy group because they’re just as capable of defending themselves in melee as any other class of foe. We’re supposed to believe in this zany future where people choose to fight with metal shields and electro-staffs, but given the unmitigated lethality of guns, you’re constantly reminded of the common sense question, “If we have the technology to put entire societies on Mars, why isn’t everybody using guns?” It’s not like you can deflect shots with your melee weapon Jedi-style, and there isn’t even a cover system. Why are Technomancers significant in this world at all if you can point a rifle at them and take them out like anyone else?

“ The button you’re mashing is dodge rather than attack, and you have to be very careful about when to stop spamming.

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This also contributes to watering down the RPG elements. You get to play around with fairly in-depth skill trees focused on three different styles of combat (offensive Warrior, defensive Guardian, and tricky Rogue, with a fourth, supplemental tree based on lightning-slinging Technomancy spells) as well as a deep gear modification system and a decent selection of non-combat talents. But every battle-related bonus you accrue feels like such a slight, incremental increase when you’re still having to spam dodge and dying to random thugs on the street 30+ character levels in. You never hit a point where you feel like an ultra space warrior who can mow down corporate goons and thirsts for more potent prey to test his skills against. And that’s totally dissonant with how Technomancers are presented in the lore.