Sometimes dreams come true. What one day seemed impossible the next materializes before our eyes, showing that the world is much more than we could imagine. But not all dreams are good; sometimes the dreams that accomplish their sorrows lead us to situations of unexpected misery. Fortunately or unfortunately, both scenes are very exceptional. Miracles rarely happen, but disasters are also very exceptional – the world seems grayer than bright colors, because the more our consciousness carries us with excitement or catastrophe with more frequency than is reasonable. This is what happened with Mechajammer, which so well it is a game that could have been a real dream and it is not, the catastrophe that invites to declare it as a tragedy would be, in its turn, very unreasonable.
If anything catches Mechajammer’s eye, it’s its vibe. Be a cyberpunk from the old school, feísta, where human life is worth less than a pedazo of any technology and violence is a common currency of change, we are in a future where humanity has spread throughout the universe, but with it also compulsory military service and a war that seems never to end. An atmosphere that translates into perfect characters to develop an interesting narrative plot.
Setting the story on an unknown planet, more precisely in a port city controlled by various criminal groups, our nave remains inoperative after a desperate hurricane has deserted our position. It’s all made up for war, and that includes it before we see anything on our nave staring at another planet, because that also translates into character creation. For the most part, it follows classic RPG principles, assigning age points to different abilities and attributes, making sure that our maximum abilities are determined by our age, which is determined by the jobs we’ve had for the longest emptied. As it could not be otherwise, all the professions available to us are either linked to military life, to delinquency or directly have been vagrants or unemployed, thus creating a perfect link between the mechanic and the narrator: in the world of Mechajammer can only be in exile or out of society, something that translates so much in the profile of people, where it is difficult that our person does not have serious physical and/or psychological problems, until than the own human environment, this is worth its own as its ability to perpetuate the system.
This makes the resulting environment extremely violent, but, unfortunately, this is also where the game begins to fall apart. Combat techniques are interesting, but too complicated. You always control a character, you can give weapons (and equipment) to several different characters, and it’s a real-time, turn-based combat machine. Ammunition is broken and weapons are broken, which will force us to make good use of the enemy’s seal or key points, so we will not be able to solve all the pains of the bad guys, at least not if we want to keep our resources at least safe. This is favored because we gradually recover health, except that we suffer from a serious disease, in which case we tend to cure this disease so that we can completely recover and cure some possible side effects depending on the part of the body where disease is making resource management an important part of the game.
So what’s the problem? This Mechajammer makes it so important that we have experience with weapons. If for some reason in creating the staff don’t place special emphasis on the handling of weapons, thinking we can go through things with mark or diplomacy, or because we think we tend to have a variety of weapons non-consumables to use , it is likely that we will find threats that we will not be able to overcome. It’s always been the case that a mission ultimately has to kill a character, or because some weapons escalate and there are many different categories of weapon skills based on their class, it’s likely we’ll We encountered at times in the game where, plain and simple, there doesn’t seem to be a reasonable solution for our characters to progress.
Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop with combat and its management. Visually, it uses a beautiful, very coherent aesthetic, where browns, blacks and greens predominate, all in subdued tones. This gives you a palette not only cyberpunk, including with a very limited use of neon, which in addition goes with the general tone of the story. The problem is that everything is so slow that it’s almost impossible to see anything. Even entire streets are difficult to see because the color palette creates very little or no contrast, which is especially dramatic when we are inside buildings or when we are looking at concrete objects or places, which can make it impossible to see. He came to roar it pixel hunt due to the lack of a dedicated button to display the interactive elements and a contrast between the characters, something that has already been played with twenty years on its panels and its color palettes are also worn.
If the first is problematic in itself, the peculiarities of our character’s vision will prevail over everything. Make sure your drawing distance is ridiculous and the smallest angle lets us see what’s on the other side of things, how many times we have to go around corners, telling trials and mistakes, ultimately leading to ridicule. This result would be as easy to fix as adding options to look through shutters, windows, or around the corner, making sure the short the most worn on the mark are not lawyers al save scum.
Unfortunately, the pastel color, which is the representation of its legal system, still remains. It is up to all of us to decide on the hidden data, we will never know exactly why we broke the time to try to act and it is up to us that progress is based on the accumulation of objectives to improve our skills and attributes, to an excessive level over time. This, again, is an opacity problem that RPGs solved decades ago – it shows how difficult actions were to know how far or how fast we were to do something and gain skill points. experience to know the progress of the game; it’s secondly something that’s been added to Mechajammer as an option, but as highly recommended, in a park behind launch – and if that goes with the atmosphere of being in a hostile world where hope is minimal, as progress seems retarded due to the constant need to watch and load games to at least have achievable conditions for complete certainty throughout the game.
But that’s the problem. Its flaws seem to be created by the need to make it harder for the player to progress, sometimes leaving very high quality of life elements in the genre, only to make the game more bronze result, which is appreciated in everything we see that the missions are interesting , the excellent scenography, the art very suggestive and its narrative, probably one of those that has been understood in a more profound and sincere way. cyberpunk inside the middle.
At the end of the story, because of the darkness that is the game, the pixel hunt, obligatory fight for those who don’t have one because they are not remotely prepared and the bugs of those who sat plagiarized the game, but which I must adjust over time until it is now reasonably free, to make the game feel a frustrating experience, unfairness and absurdity. Which is a shame, because Mechajammer has the perfect characters to be an RPG old school capable of driving fans of the genre as much as fanatics of cyberpunk, even those that coincide will stay true to both niches at the same time. The problem is that its opacity, stylistic decisions, and reluctance to make basic concessions to even more western RPGs hardcore For several decades a game that, although it could have been a dream come true, has not been transformed into a pesadilla, but it is a deceptive dream that has not left us barely after the dream.
