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Mechajammer isn’t quite an isometric Deus Ex yet, but there’s potential hereMore shooting than sneaking right now
More shooting than sneaking right now
As far as we know, cyberpunk RPGMechajammerhasneither mechs or jam in it. It does, however, have goopy red lava pools in its dense, alien forest, and as you bust out of a military base lined with rows upon rows of chunky pixel brains floating in big, bubbling fluid jars, you stumble across the remains of a huge, metal Vykinaut.
Mechajammer Reveal Trailer - PC Gaming Show [4K]Watch on YouTube
Mechajammer Reveal Trailer - PC Gaming Show [4K]
For up ahead is another military base full of armed guards, and you can either go in guns blazing (and probably end up like the poor Vykinaut) or with stealthy sneaking, avoiding sight cones and hunkering down in vision-obscuring hedges to creep your way to victory. The aim is to find your friend Pelican who’s waiting on the other side of the base with a helicopter so she can whisk you away to safety, but getting there is easier said than done. Mechajammer ishard, and I died more times than I care to admit figuring out how to turn its semi real-time, semi-turn-based tactical battle system to my advantage.
What exactly is a Vykinaut? I can see something that looks like a head with teeth, but your guess is as good as mine.
I was given a choice of three preset character builds when I started playing - Conrad, a male pistol expert; Mika, a stealthy knife thrower; and Adrie, a lady with a passion for wrenches, hammers and clubs. You can also create your own, or modify any of the three starter builds to your liking, including their age and gender, which can have an effect on your final stats, their name and profile art, as well as their ‘virtues’ and ‘studies’.
Studies are effectively your skill set, and you can place small stones on categories such as “One-Handed Edge”, “Slug Guns” or “Blocking” to enhance that skill, or pour them into attributes such as “Social”, “Burglary”, “Hacking”, and “Repair”. Virtues, meanwhile, are your innate traits and abilities - things like your pain threshold, how quiet you are when sneaking, how much muscle mass you have and how far you can see and discern shapes in the shadows. You have 5-6 dice to spend in each category, and I can only assume you’ll be able to throw down more dice to invest in these skills as the game progresses. In my demo build, I didn’t encounter any additional dice, nor did I seem to level up in any way that rewarded me with extra dice to spend on additional buffs.
“26-35 years olds' Learning is capped at 3 dice.” Sounds about right.
I went with Mika, the sneaky dagger man, on my first run. I’ve always preferred stealthy approaches in immersive sims such asDeus ExandDishonored, and I was hoping I’d be equally adept at ghosting my way through Mechajammer’s military base. It begins simply enough. A couple of shuffling mutants in a dark corridor here, one armed guard there. Easy peasy.
But once I passed the Vykinaut in my preview build, the second military base I had to clear became a real test of skill, which I ended up failing quite miserably on several occasions. The general flow of battle feels quite stilted compared to other RPGs, no doubt a result of your characters being tied to its hexagonal grid and turns playing out in such rapid, quickfire succession that they barely seem turn-based at all. It’s a little jarring to start with, but it does give Mechajammer a unique kind of staccato rhythm I haven’t seen anywhere else. I liked it, and I don’t think this is what kept leading to my untimely downfall.
There are some caches around to replenish your ammo supplies, but enemies will swarm you if you make too much noise cracking them open.
So I loaded up the demo again and this time chose sharpshooter Conrad. I fared a little better on this run. For starters, I discovered an entire room full of bullet caches and chests I’d missed on my first try - but attempting to open these boxes and replenish my dwindling bullet reserves only alerted more guards to my location and more swift medic reboots. You can escape detection if you’re quick, but my blundering partner Barry was simply waltzing around all over the shop, doing more harm than good.
Perhaps I need to spend more time with Mechajammer in order to properly suss out its secrets. The demo doesn’t really tell you how to do much of anything during its 30-odd minute run-time, and I suspect a more thorough tutorial may well fix a lot of my current woes, particularly when it comes to managing and directing the rest of your party. There’s definitely a lot to like here, and if its stealth can match the immersive highs of my favourite Deus Ex games, then Whalenought could really have something special. Mechajammer’s noise meters, hacking, burglary and perception stats all point towards an engaging isometric, turn-based tactics take on the Deus Ex formula, but I’ve yet to see it manifest in the moment-to-moment gameplay. It’s one to watch, for sure - stealthily, from the bushes, perhaps, while eating a pot of jam - and I’ll be awaiting its full release (simply ‘coming soon’ on Steam at time of writing) with cautious anticipation.
