The Technomancer

Technomancer is a great mid-tier game in a time of either indie or AAA. In this landscape of huge budgets or homegrown tales of scrapping a game together with shoestrings and duct tape, there’s an opportunity for gaps to be filled. Spiders bring us a competent Sci-Fi RPG that gives depth, interesting mechanics, and challenging combat with a clear progression. What it lacks in a few technical hiccups, control frustrations, and lack of weight behind decisions it makes up for in the ability for the player to play the core game any way they want.

Caveat to this review again; written for a site that I write reviews for fairly regularly, feel free to check that out via my profile but I won't spam links on this fine site here.

Spiders, the team behind Mars: War Logs brings Technomancer forward as a spiritual successor. Not a true sequel but a follow-up that expands upon what the team tried to do with the first go. While personally having no base of reference for what Spiders has done previously in the Sci-Fi realm, Bound By Flame at least sounded familiar before jumping into Technomancer.

Upon beginning the game we jump in right away to a cutscene that gives a huge chunk of exposition and sets up the world. More than a few feelings of Blade Runner and Mass Effect came up as the voiceover played through, and this was the point where my first feeling of a fairly drab color palette came up. Thrown right into the character creator following the opening, the first glimpses of a fairly deep customization and a path forward make themselves known. While there are only a few haircuts and faces, the combinations are varied enough that most players will have mostly differing characters with a few repetitions here and there.

We are Zachariah Mancer, and initially, we’re on our first mission to test our skills with our mentor, Sean Mancer. The journey early on is indicative of the experience that permeates the rest of the game, as most quests are a matter of going to a marker and either finding the only character with the X prompt above their head, or hurting everything in sight to the point they either die or surrender via cutscene. Putting aside that all the Technomancers have last names of Mancer with some fairly common first names that make things sound pretty out of place, the overall feeling of belonging to a school of these sort of future-mage class is decent. There are touches of zealotry and deception, following orders, and other somewhat common themes to be expected. More often than not the story and mostly mediocre voice acting paired with some heavy handed writing leaves things a little predictable and sometimes downright boring to get through. If any part of that formula were increased just a bit, be it voicework or writing, may have made things a bit more interesting but the end result is mostly middling.

The story doesn’t necessarily detract from anything, as most gamers are used to a narrative that is one of three main courses (incredible, ok, awful), and Technomancer sticks to the middle of that. The larger hiccups come in the way of technical aspects; the camera and collision. The core of combat in Technomancer is the selection of three stances; guardian, warrior, or rogue. Guardian possesses a shield and mace-style weapon, warrior a staff, and rogue a knife and gun. Each is also very unique with the rogue being a quick style, warrior being a bit more distance and area-of-effect attacker, and guardian being the more tank-style. The stances are well-executed in that players can choose to pour everything into one stance, or spread points out evenly to achieve totally different results. My personal path was one of first rogue-centric, then balance because I found different situations and enemies require a different approach.

This combat, for the most part, works very well, but rolling, in particular, can be a little tricky as the collision with other characters seems a very sticky affair. More times than can be counted I’d try the Dark Souls or Witcher dodges to line up a counter attack and instead roll into another NPC and stop dead in my tracks to finish the animation or immediately get struck. Combat is also very good when it works as you think it should – games like the two previously mentioned excel in combat because of positive feedback. When you strike an enemy they stagger or register that they’ve been hit each time. In Technomancer they tend to do that most of the time, but other times they’ll seemingly be totally unaffected by your stabs or slashes, and kick your Mancer in the mouth. The feeling that results is one of throwing the hands up and not understanding what or why that happened – usually this can be avoided by recognizing when the enemy has been hit consecutively then dodging and attacking again, but it results in a strange looking battle of strike, strike, roll – strike, strike, roll every time.

Also of note and frustration were the prompts for searching, healing and other actions are mapped to the same button. X tends to be the interact, which when you’ve got party members near you and a corpse or chest to loot, you’ll find yourself wasting a health injection accidentally healing your teammates when you meant to open a chest.

Light frustrations aside, the depth of Technomancer cannot be denied. Systems abound there are infinite possibilities for differing characters; reputation, talents, abilities, XP bonuses, crafting, team recruiting, and much more await those that are in for something that borrows from a few other franchises but in smart ways.

The setting also bears note because it tends to be initially good to look at, but starts to get a bit muddy and brown as it goes on. As it takes place on Mars, it’s hard not to, and I don’t have the answer for what could’ve spiced things up. Spiders did a few very smart things though making the hubs feel different – Ophir is the citadel and has a distinct sterile feeling, while Noctis is more tribal, mostly built into cliffs in a dangerous environment where creatures are more enemies than man. There’s a decent variety but it’s hard not to notice the red, gray, and brown palette that seems to wear after a while.

Pros

• Extremely deep systems – XP, Talents, Abilities, Stances and much more keep things interesting
• Diverse cast of characters Zachariah meets through his journey
• Interesting social castes and issues brought up by having many different groups across the planet

Cons

• Technical issues like collision and lack of feedback in combat can be frustrating
• Lackluster voice work, writing, facial animation, and even name choices can be distracting and plain boring
• Drab palette can be depressing and muddy

The Bottom Line

Technomancer is a great mid-tier Sci-Fi RPG. Those waiting patiently for Mass Effect: Andromeda might find their appetite satiated for the time being, but those wanting a flawless AAA experience will be left frustrated. The depth of the game is extremely admirable and well-handled, the influences are well placed without being beaten to death, and the game overall straddles the line between good and fine.

*I was provided a digital code on PS4 for review purposes courtesy of Focus Home Interactive and Spiders.