The Technomancer

Imagine KOTOR with its third person view and three party member group dynamic (except with a bigger game world and without the Star Wars IP)

Imagine the sci-fi stylings of Mass Effect (except without the great Bioware characters and intricate storytelling).

Imagine the Witcher 3 and its slightly sluggish and animation-prioritized brawling combat.

Where the circles of this Venn diagram overlap, The Technomancer exists.That doesn't mean that this game is as good as any of those titles.

Categorically it isn't.

In fact the problems with this sci-fi adventure RPG are numerous. Chief among them is the mismatch between the self-seriousness of the setting and the (poorly written) immature teen-angst dialogue of the characters (some of which feels as if it has been lifted wholesale from a 1980s cartoon). This is a pretty serious flaw and it really undermines the gritty epic sci fi adventure tone that Spiders otherwise appear to be pursuing.

Following the introduction, the narrative setup of The Technomancer quickly becomes one of the protagonist and his rag tag group being perpetually on the run from the chief antagonist and his authoritarian forces. As such the good guys can't stay for long in any one location.

And its this premise that brings us to the second big flaw with The Technomancer. Every place you are allegedly no longer welcome at along the way becomes re-visitable (at little to no risk). In fact the game actually sends you all-but immediately back to these places (presumably to re-use the environments they made as many times as possible) after having categorically told you that you have no choice but to leave them on pain of death. As a narrative device it is used in both of the major world hubs you visit. That's not all though...It also crops up again in an outdoor sequence where a timer is put on screen to indicate the impending sunrise, and thus obligation to find shelter from the supposedly lethal sun before the timer runs out. This sequence felt different and interesting and did a decent job of creating some tension. However, the game almost immediately sends you back out into the same area once again for another objective and there’s no consequence at all in choosing to do so during the daytime. Perhaps it was just a ‘really’ sunny day the first time around? Perhaps my character found and applied some special Technomancer factor 1000 sunblock while I wasn't looking?

Whereas the character dialogue and narrative pretexts are flimsy at best (and illogical at worst), The Technomancer really recovers quite a bit of ground with its visual style and solid (if unspectacular) combat mechanics. Combat is differentiated into three styles, with each style falling into a combat archetype (essentially rogue, sword and board, and two handed) and is complemented by magical skills that are unlocked relative to progression in each of these three styles. Inventory items can be leveled with damage modifiers that require correspondingly-leveled crafting skills to create and fully exploit. If companion loyalty quest-lines are completed, and good relationship status is correspondingly attained, then certain party characters will convey a stat bonus in this regard (or in terms of things like charisma and lock picking) to supplement your own stats and correspondingly enable higher level feats overall while they are in your active party.

The quality of both the combat and the player character development varies a little. They never drop below 'acceptable' but also never rise up the scale any higher than 'good'. Unfortunately for The Technomancer, they are the game's strongest areas and much of the rest of the game is 'bad'.

It should also be noted that Spiders created an architecturally imaginative and distinctive world that generally looks great (although the quality declines over time). Sadly they didn't capitalize on this effort by filling it with the kind of content that would have brought it to life more convincingly. For instance, most of the hub NPCs have no dialogue and can't be interacted with in any way. Those that can be interacted with have very narrowly defined parameters of interaction. Party NPCs, on the other hand, have plenty to say. A small proportion of it is interesting, but most of it is both boring and inconsequential from either a game play or a character development perspective. The end result is a world that feels much less rich than it obviously had the potential to be.

One is left with the feeling that the concept artists in the development of this game must've been fantastic but that the character dialogue and/or translation teams must have been, by contrast, pretty awful.

As is the case with the majority of components to this game; the story suffers from a dearth of originality, it lacked depth and it was under-cooked. None of the characters were interesting enough, well voiced enough, or well scripted enough to help stretch the weak origin material into something more substantial.

The story beats themselves are largely predictable (when not falling prone to the kinds of logical fallacies I outline above) and for the last half a dozen hours at the end of the piece it felt as if the game was being stretched out to fill time. A glut of weakly seeded and generally unearned plot developments appear out of nowhere at the back end of the story to direct the lead up to the end game. At the same time as these narrative cluster bombs are being deployed, the game funnels you through an excessive number of grindy, repetitive, and unnecessarily difficult combat encounters. Correspondingly, the feelings I had when walking away from the game were confusion, irritation, and boredom.

All in all...not a strong finish!

In my fairest-minded assessment however, I'd still concede that this is one of those titles then that has very little going for it but that 'very little' does still provide some genuine moments of entertainment throughout the game. This might be enough for some people to give the game a 3/5 score but I can't quite stretch to being that charitable. The negative parts to this game are more frequent (and significant) than the positive and outweigh them correspondingly. So I feel a below medium score of 2/5 is fairest.

I finished the game in 36 hours and while I don’t regret playing, I would still strongly advise others against the experience. There’s nothing about this game that hasn’t been done better elsewhere and while there's a limited degree of charm in this title it's probably not enough to warrant a purchase... and certainly not one at full price.