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Mechajammer review: a broken, brown disasterBrowning my sorrows
Browning my sorrows
If I had to describeMechajammerin a word, that word would be “brown”. A second would be the sounds Joe Pesci makes in Home Alone.
In theory, and its trailers, and even inan earlier demo, Mechajammer is a stylish, complex, intriguingly messy cyberpunk RPG with a chaotic retro look.
Mechajammer Reveal Trailer - PC Gaming Show [4K]Watch on YouTube
Mechajammer Reveal Trailer - PC Gaming Show [4K]
In practice, the first thing you do is blunder around a brown area punching rats. This is a game with a rat problem. Almost any time you find an unopened door, the answer to “what’s in here?” will be “nothing” or “rats”. As someone whose first day at a job once included killing a rat with a pipe, I am begging any game developers reading to trust me on this: fighting rats is not difficult, interesting, or remotely rewarding. Please, please,pleasestop making us fight fucking rats.
Pixel hunting is half the game, to the extent that I offered a bounty to any colleague who could find the gun I was looking for in one brown screenshot. There’s a slight shimmering effect that at least keeps Mechajammer from 90s adventure game levels, but the tiny, brown graphics make most items impossible to recognise. The heaps of items are mostly redundant or useless, and at the time of writing it’s impossible to sell any item to anyone. Not that I’ve found any shops that had more to sell than the same cigarettes I was dumping in the street, or a rope with a placeholder icon. Truly, dear customer, my new business is your one-stop shop for some cigarettes and a rope.
The pixel hunting is made worse when you have lackeys, as they’ll get in the way. I’ve found no clear limit to how many lackeys you can recruit, a feature that sounds exciting enough that mentioning it feels like misrepresentation. Almost any non-hostile NPC can be “charmed” without cost or risk, whereupon they will immediately become your loyal mindslave, willing to play high-stakes Bludgeon with anything in your path. In the run I stuck with, I put several points (actually dice. Whenever a skill is used, deeces are rolled, and instead of directly increasing skills, you add another cube to the pool) into “social” purely so I could use the charm option on the hordes of homeless people wandering around, and send them to die for me so I wouldn’t have to kite a dozen gangsters one at a time. You can even give them weapons, and in another cool-sounding feature, lackeys will attempt to heal you when you die..
“Tell me more” type dialogue options will sometimes quit the conversation instead, forcing yet another reload when it cuts you off from plot critical information or brown items. Not that there’s any plot to speak of so far. I’m on the run from Earth with two people and a robot, none of whom matter or do anything. We’re stuck on Planet Brown and to escape we have to punch every rat in the universe. Your character knows nothing and cares about nothing, and the only effect of the colourful-sounding, faintlyDarklands-ish jobs, age, and perk/flaw system I’ve discerned is that if at any point you pick the “PTSD” flaw, your soldier will become catatonic for ten minutes if he fires his own weapon. Even without this, you’ll die often. The health regeneration and tendency of most enemies go down quickly are the welcome mercies keeping it from a total wash, but you are still woefully outnumbered and will die without constantly feeding more homeless people to the enemy. Stealth is just the same thing but slower.
The bridges bring me on to navigation, which is a total pain in the arse. The main view is isometric and the map doesn’t mark most landmarks or your position, making the brown streets confusing to get around as it’s also upside down. Retro is one thing, but a map so archaic it predates the concept of North is new to me. Movement is worse, as its interpretation of line of sight bars evenattemptingto move somewhere you can’t see, such as, for example, through a door. You have to push the door open, then awkwardly shuffle through it, then inside the brown room, then either fight some rats or realise it’s empty, then do it all again to get out. That’s if it doesn’t get stuck and force you to hokey cokey in and out of the doorway a few times. Walking around corners indoors is like programming a roomba in real-time while your housemate formats it every few seconds, and the one good thing I can say about the doors is that they’re not brown. It’s just endless shuffling and clicking and trudging back and forth on an ugly, empty map with annoying, often unresponsive controls and no reason to care about anything.
I could go on with describing Mechajammer’s flaws and failures for far, far longer than I could stand playing it any more. The sheer relief at exorcising my complaints are the closest I’ve come to enjoying it since my brief excitement at the promise of its character creation screen. Between its awful, threadbare design and a shocking number of bugs and major glitches, this has been an absolutely miserable experience and not even close to fit for release.
