Imagine if you took the Batman: Arkham games, made Batman significantly weaker and less durable than every single mook the Joker throws at him, lifted the restriction on how many enemies can attack him simultaneously, and removed the excellent UI prompts that allow the Caped Crusader to react quickly to danger, flipping and dodging heroically around the battlefield while looking like a badass. That’s basically what almost every fight feels like in The Technomancer.
Even on Normal difficulty, playing on a character with over 20 hours of experience - well into the late game - with the best gear available and a balanced party, the standard humanoid enemies that you run into all over the place feel both significantly tougher and more deadly than you. One wrong move can get you killed almost instantly, while even the most common foes seem to soak up damage from my technomagically-buffed equipment like mercenary sponges. It really breaks the illusion that Technomancers are supposed to be the iconic, mystical heroes of the setting. And you’re often required to fight severely outnumbered on top of it all.
There’s also the matter of firearms. A lot of enemies carry them, and some of them even have fully automatic variants that your character can’t even equip. They do loads of damage and can allow upwards of three or four enemies to plink away at your health from a safe distance while you’re engaged with their buddies. You won’t get any prompt that you’re about to be fired upon, and since one or more shooters may be off-screen at any given time, it’s fairly common to die to gunfire in the middle of a brawl before you even know what happened. Gunmen don’t even seem to have any weaknesses; you can’t simply close on them and take them out quickly before engaging the rest of an enemy group because they’re just as capable of defending themselves in melee as any other class of foe. We’re supposed to believe in this zany future where people choose to fight with metal shields and electro-staffs, but given the unmitigated lethality of guns, you’re constantly reminded of the common sense question, “If we have the technology to put entire societies on Mars, why isn’t everybody using guns?” It’s not like you can deflect shots with your melee weapon Jedi-style, and there isn’t even a cover system. Why are Technomancers significant in this world at all if you can point a rifle at them and take them out like anyone else?
The relatively high enemy damage and health in comparison to what we’re able to wield seem like they might have been intended to keep fights from turning into a button-mashing exercises. The thing is, they actually make it more of a button-masher. It’s just that the button you’re mashing is dodge rather than attack, and you have to be very careful about when to stop spamming it and try to get a hit in or you’ll be toast. There’s no flow or rhythm to it, and the frustration scales up with the size of an enemy group. It doesn’t feel difficult in the Dark Souls sense, where you learn to iterate and get better with each death. It’s just random, tiresome, and annoying, no matter how much time or how many stat points you invest. I kept wondering if there was something I wasn’t getting about Technomancer’s combat. But if I, as an experienced and adaptable RPG player, can make it through a 30-hour campaign without catching onto the specific way I’m supposed to be playing to have fun, that’s just a different brand of failure.
So much could have been forgiven if the central, action RPG pillar of combat wasn’t constructed so poorly in
The Technomancer. The world is clearly crafted with vision and attention to detail, but the characters who inhabit it come off too often as awkward marionettes who would rather be doing something else besides participating in this story.
http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/06/28/the-technomancer-review