So I have something to admit. I have played every game Spiders has made but its original XBLA title about Faeries through to completion. As I've gotten older my time for gaming has steadily dwindled. There are so many huge 50+ hour games out these days and I just don't have time for them all. So I like the fact that Spiders makes RPG's that you can finish in about 10 to 15 hours. It's like playing a condensed version of the systems that make games like Mass Effect and The Witcher so compelling. You get moral choices, companions with detailed backstories and personal quests, and even basic romance options that generally allow you to seal the deal shortly before a final climactic, near suicidal, mission. The settings are also usually unique even if the writing and story within those settings are pretty bad. Mars: War Logs is obviously set on the titular red planet. Of Orcs and Men turns the standard fantasy genre on its head by having the Orcs as the heroes and the humans as the villains. And Bound By Flame sees you take control of a man possessed by a demon.

The Technomancer is set in the same universe as Mars: War Logs, which is good because despite the awful dialogue the concepts behind a lot of the world building were really clever. So I was excited to see where Spiders would take things. I especially liked the idea of playing as a Technomancer, the Jedi-like order that protects the citizens of Mars.

And from an objective standpoint it is hard to argue that this game isn't an improvement over Spiders' previous efforts. The combat takes place as usual in real time, but for the first time the hits actually have some weight to them. Previous Spiders games felt like MMOs. The battles were in real time, yes, but I was still essentially selecting things from a menu and executing them. This time around the combat feels more like something out of The Witcher 3 or Dragon Age 3. It's an improvement without a doubt. Likewise both the writing and the acting are a step above what Spiders has done before. Gone are the awful translations from War Logs and the deadpan delivery from Bound by Flame. Nothing here is masterful or even great, but its serviceable.

And presentation wise this is the best sounding and looking Spiders game yet, with a great over-the-top Imperial-March-inspired theme playing every time the villain appears on screen. It's cheesy but effective. And yet despite all this, I feel like I'm enjoying this title the least of Spiders' efforts. If I had to guess I would chalk it up to the semi-open nature of the various areas you go through. Despite having a Diablo-style semi-transparent map that you can overlay over the screen, the maze like setup of the various areas makes navigating them a chore, and I have yet to see any sign of a fast travel system. Previous Spiders titles have been critiqued for their linear level designs, but this new format is far from an improvement. Walking back and forth over the same handful of areas for hours on end is just boring, no matter how improved everything else in the game is. You know the navigation in a game sucks when you are praying that the game just cuts to the location of a mission after a cutscene instead of making you walk there.

It's strange to be honest. A decade ago I would have said you were crazy if you told me I'd be pining for the simple linear levels of yore, but here I am, really wishing Spiders would go back to its previous ultra-linear structure. Not to mention this game is already far longer than all their previous works. Spiders excelled at making simple, quick, easy to digest RPG's. I really hope that they don't make the same mistake as Bioware did this generation and think that every RPG needs to be a 100+ hour magnum-opus. We had a generation full of short linear games, and I appreciate the artistic need of developers to finally be able to make something on a larger scale, but it just feels like everyone doing too much at once and its getting hard for me at least to keep up.