Spiders is back with its latest RPG, but can The Technomancer rise to the occasion? Find out in our review!
Great games aren‘t just good ideas on paper brought to life. They‘re stuffed full of intangible qualities that inspire you to remember the experience long after the credits have rolled. The Technomancer, a new RPG from French studio Spiders, looks to the greats for inspiration but is ultimately nothing more than a set of clever moving parts cobbled together.
The set-up is there: a story with the political intrigue of Mass Effect; the combat and romance of The Witcher; and a setting (Mars) ripe with promise, but while the ingredients are cleverly chosen the final flourish is missing.
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It’s not one of the greats then, but is it good? The story gets off to a promising start. You‘re placed in the shoes of Zachariah Mancer, a technomancer who lives on a colony within Mars. Mars is built on the foundations of corrupt bureaucrats tugging for power and no one can truly be trusted. Dystopian themes are writ large, and the technomancers, an elite race imbued with electricity, are in the thick of it.
The intent is to build a Sci-Fi epic here, but Spiders‘ dramatic range is hampered by the technology powering the game. Besides our hero, every character looks like a wax figure and yet they’re so often the focal point of the screen, their lifeless faces central to the story. The game engine can’t muster a range of believable expressions and so it plays the story straight, resulting in a cast that is at times comically po-faced. The voice artists delivering their lines do their best to rise to their part, lending the story a B-movie seriousness that sells the script short. Motion capture is hugely expensive, of course, and I don’t begrudge any team making a game on a budget, but the problem is that without the verisimilitude, The Technomancer’s story is harder to invest in.
The setting is an even bigger missed opportunity. The sun-drenched Red Planet is only ever window dressing that you spy from a distance, like a mirage in the desert – out of reach, somehow tantalising. Instead of being free to explore the planet, you‘re tied down indoors and warp between individual hubs using a car called the Rover. This machine is built to tackle the scorching sun, but you spend the journey watching cutscenes inside the car and staring at loading screens. You‘re on Mars, but you only know that because you‘re told you are. Many games actually benefit from this kind of sharp focus, but The Technomancer is not one of them. It‘s crying out for open-world traversal with a world portrayed in broad brushstrokes. But instead of sprawling vistas, you get claustrophobic interiors with the characters – not the location – in focus, played out to severe close-ups like a daytime soap.
We‘re off to a bad start, then, but forgive me because The Technomancer is full of neat features and, dare I say, good ideas. For a start, the urban hubs are well made and full of striking touches. There are merchants to meet and trade with and quests to pick up and undertake, and the second hub reminds me of Fallout 3’s Megaton, full of sprawling blocks of land constructed from corrugated iron.
Each area is large, but you’re given a rather brilliant map you can display on-screen by depressing the right trigger. It’s the last word in ergonomic design and a clever evolution of the mini map due to the fact that it’s transparent, allowing you to run and navigate at the same time. (It’s useful too, because you’ll spend 80% of your time running between map markers like a courier).
There are other neat touches too, like the real-time menus, in which you can browse Zach’s equipment, skills and objectives, and the team menus, which allow you to switch seamlessly between Zach and squadmates. It all feels well-thought out, and in a game where you’re juggling a lot of stuff, it’s great to see.
Combat is an interesting beast. You have four different fighting styles you can adopt and upgrade as you see fit. If you played the Nioh demo recently, you‘ll spot the similarities right away. Here, however, your stance fundamentally changes the experience. Perhaps you‘d like to try Rogue, which gives you a gun and a knife you can duel wield, or Guardian, which affords you a shield. My personal favourite is Warrior, which gives you a stave and a wide arc of attack. There’s even the option of stealth, which, if upgraded, allows you to take down enemies quietly.
30 hours in, I‘m still not sure whether I enjoy combat in The Technomancer. It‘s certainly going to be polarising for players, principally because it‘s difficult. Even on easy, it‘s not unusual to die from 3 or 4 strikes. That‘s both a good and bad thing. On the one hand, encounters are tense in an almost Dark Souls fashion. On the other, you soon realize that to succeed, all you need to do is repeat a set of combinations that never fail: providing you‘re diligent about mashing square (strike) and immediately following up with a liberal use of circle (dodge), you’re invulnerable to an attack. If you‘re dying, it‘s because you‘re too slow on the combination. The difficulty, then, is in the fast-twitch responses, rather than the act of learning and mastering a style of play.
Clearly a lot of work has gone in to this fundamental aspect of the experience, though, and you can’t fault Spiders for effort – or genorosity. The Technomancer is stuffed with story missions and sidequests, and it’s incredible that a team the fraction the size of AAA companies has delivered a game with so much content. It runs well too, with crisp framerates and only brief loading times, and coupled with the intuitive menus, you have a well-oiled experience.
But The Technomancer lacks something: personality, character, flavour, you name it. Pick beneath the surface and the world feels staged, inorganic, false. The great games have something distinctive about them: a colour palette, a soundtrack, an atmosphere all unto their own. Some AAA games are lucky enough to throw wads of cash at the wall and see what sticks. The Technomancer doesn’t have this luxury, and it’s B-movie roots are belied by niggles, like jerky controls.
It’s at times competent, even pretty – but it never takes the breath away. The red dunes of Mars beg to be explored, but they‘re only ever a view in the distance. Spiders bogs you down in the nitty gritty of a Sci-Fi soap opera without ever broadening the scope to let you go free.
It‘s a real shame, because there‘s an amazing game waiting to be made. Spiders has done the legwork, dreaming up a hierarchy of characters changed irrevocably by the planet.
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The lore is in place and the world has been imagined, but while it’s filled with stuff to do it’s light on memories that you can take away long after the credits have rolled. If you’re a fan of RPGs, you’ll find a competent game that ticks a lot of boxes. But check your expectations at the door – because this isn’t going to blow you away.
Score: 6/10
What are your thoughts on our review of The Technomancer? Be sure to let us know in the comments below!
