So is it worth playing yet?
TL;DR — Do not spend a second on this.
Long version: nope. Mechajammer should have been aborted somewhere around the seventh—or seventeenth—art style change. Doesn't matter whether you're trying to film a movie, or write a book, or develop a video game; at one point you have to stick to a certain vision, and see it through. Not hop around from one idea to the next, never really landing on one.
Basically, it's a hodgepodge of half-assed ideas absolutely drowning in bugs and glitches. At this point I don't even think the game is fixable, and should the developers find it in them to work tirelessly in order to patch their work, I hope for their sake they're not prone to depression.
I always try to focus on the positive aspects of a game, almost never review a game, rarely frequent forums, and it's the first time in my life I create an account somewhere solely in order to talk about a game; yet here I am, with about twenty hours of play time, on the off-chance I could dissuade someone from ever playing this, to spare them the misfortune. Sorry in advance for the wall of the text.
Starting from the character creation, it already goes haywire. At first glance it seems promising; various attributes and focus on weapons and hacking and social and chemistry and others, plus your choice of birth kit that affects what profession your character might chose later on in life. Many professions, each giving you a bonus or malus to this skill or that one. And with each phase of your character's life spent working, there are side effects. But right there it already goes off the rails.
Imagine that like me you're super original and chose 'soldier' as a profession for your character between the ages of 20 and 25, because you want to pew-pew your way to the end; well you get bonuses to slug weapons, and plasma weapons, and so on, but also have to chose a side effect. You can take
Flawless, aka 'nothing ventured; nothing gained' because with this your character doesn't get any of the aforementionned bonuses to weapon-handling, thus reducing your choice to pure flavor. You can take
PTSD, aka 'I want my experience with this game to be utter misery', because with that option—get this—your character has to pass a check after
every single action in combat or panic and be as vulnerable as an abandoned toddler in Yemen. You can also take
Nerve Damage, which makes it so that every wound (not damage, wound) suffered also means your character gets knocked down for a couple of turns. Or, you can opt for
Exhaustion, the result of which makes it so that at the top of every in-game hour, your character might become suddenly exhausted, collapse to the ground, then promptly get back up without suffering any consequence whatsoever.
So for this specific profession, soldier, we have four choices of side effects. One of which (Flawless) nets you flavor and only that; another one (PTSD) that cripples your character to a downright absurd level; a third one (Nerve Damage) that is mildly annoying but manageable; and a final, fourth one (Exhaustion), that might as well be called 'Flawless but your get to keep all the bonuses'. It's ridiculous. There's not even a semblance of an attempt at making it a balanced or though or even interesting choice.
Then you start playing. You click on the ground to move over there. You can't
hold down to move; you have to click again and again and again and again. Not so when aboard a vehicle though; when driving you move about with WASD. Why can't you click on the ground when in a vehicle? Why no WASD movement when on foot? Who the fuck knows. Also, about three out of ten times, clicking to move doesn't work—especially when quickly traversing places, it seems the game itself wonders if you can walk there or not. It's not a misclick. But often you click once to move, yet your character doesn't. Then you click a second time—without moving your mouse—and still nothing. So you click a third time—still on the exact same spot—and now for some reason your character finally moves.
Passing through doors and windows—and in general the simple act of moving about—is a crapshoot. There's no turning the camera, nor even the thought of transparency when you or anyone or anything is behind a wall, and the whole world is muddy and imprecise-looking. Numerous times I had to pixel-hunt for a spot on the floor, beyond the door or window I'd just opened, in order to enter the room. One time, I could not walk through a room, but I could jump as if a Siphoner. A handfull of times, I was simply unable to enter certains rooms at all; the door was open, and I could see beyond, and the cursor indicated that I could walk there, but nope, no can do.
Pixel-hunting is also a staple of most fights. You can target body parts; how exciting! So what's it do? Well... uh... stuff. The game assures me it does stuff. What precisely, I've never been able to find out. And boy of boy, if ever you find yourself in a doorway with a teeny-tiny rat at your feet blocking your way, good luck ever targeting that damned rodent. Might as well try to snipe its whiskers from five miles away with a flare gun.
Character progression is as bare-bones as can be. No perks; no skills; no talents of any kind. Each x levels, you get a dice to add to your main stats, and each level you get a pip that can be added to your weapon-handling, or hacking, or whatever. So you have a six-sided dice, and a +1. Then +2, +3, +4, +5, and then you get another dice, bringing you to 2d6. I... What? Am I missing something here? Unless you absolutely
need to hit that 12, and can re-roll as many times as you want, how is 1d6+5 not massively more enviable than 2d6? I don't know man, that seems so basic I really feel like an idiot who's missing something right in the middle of my face.
The environments are... depressing, from a gameplay point of view. Buildings you can't enter. Empty buildings by the dozens. Hundreds and hundreds of crates without absolutely nothing in it. Other crates, always color-coded, always offer you a certain type of ammo. Terminals you can hack for money—except when the game bugs out, and gets stuck forever at 'checking... 91%' during your attempt at hacking, forcing you to abort said attempt (this bug in particular does not resolve itself on reload; only upon restarting the game). Literal throngs of vagrants; the exact same sprite only in a handful of different color schemes, copy and pasted
thousands of time everywhere in the city.
Dialogues are almost non-existent. Just resolved what passes for a companion quest (go there and find my friend pwease)? Congrats! The companion you helped will say thanks, but his dialogue won't get any update, so that if you try to talk to him about his friend you rescued a second ago, he'll vomit the same line from before. Also: no interaction
at all between the guy and his friend. None. Zilch. Nada. Que dalle.
Combat is brain-dead. Stand in place and shoot. At least with my character, 99% of the time it was a one-shot-one-kill kind of situation. Melée guys just come at you, doing nothing. No skill, no spear throw, nothing. Guys with guns... shoot? Sometimes. But also, most times, they seem to kinda wander around, doing fuck all aside from reminding me painfully that I shelled 20€ for this game.
Factions. The Bottlers, and the Boys, and the Fishmongers, and the R4ts, and the Temps, and the Miners and others, and they're omnipresent in this city's life. No personality to them. Also, they're waring with one another. Go talk to the main guard of one faction, and he'll call his boss, and the boss will say you look like shit left on the pavement during the hottest day of the year in Phoenix, AZ, but hey, kill the boss of that other faction and we'll be cool. And so it goes, the exact same way each time, for all the factions I've found—save one, the Cyberfreaks, whose boss I somehow convinced to lend me troops after I had mowed down about 150 of his guys. No social check even (my character had 0 dice -4 in social)! Just picked the 'hey, alliance?' dialogue option, and there we go, out of nowhere, we're best buds now.
Rioters! See, the people in this game know that they're the misbegotten progeny of six years of the devs changing everything about the game every two weeks; so they're pissed, and they riot. In practice, about 5 guys will randomly start shit in the street, ultra-violence themselves in under 20 seconds, and that's that. Oh yeah: once, the cops showed up. That was riveting for about half a breath.
Bugs at every turn, at every step even. Items vanishing from my inventory or duplicating themselves
all the fucking time. Not in a million year could I insist sufficiently on how maddening and anguish-inducing it is. Entire stacks of ammo disappeared—plasma and laser ammo, which I did not use nor sell, so no user mistake here. But my stack of incendiary slug ammo (rare and expensive) duplicated itself five times at once, and each stack was functionnal. Ammo is loaded into the gun, but simultaneously remains in your inventory, and if you dump the ammo out of your bag, sometimes you still have a full mag, sometimes not. Trading to a merchant? Yeah, better make a save. As well, equipping or unequipping any armor instantly unloads all ammo from my equipped gun. This one is hilarious, admittedly. Put helmet on: no ammo! Remove helmet: full ammo! This is the best no-hands trick I've ever seen. Have not checked if this could be used to reload during combat at no action cost. Once, I clicked on a repair kit in my inventory, to place it somewhere alse; my equipped slug smg disappeared. It's insance. Also, I had a certain piece of armor disappear from my inventory early on, only to reappear about five hours later, with -17% durabilty; it was unselectionable, unequippable, and its image was super-imposed over other items in my inventory. Quality stuff; I can see where the six years in development went...
Can't split a stack of anything. So if a vagrant or someone else asks for money, you open your inventory, then click on your fat pile of green, and with that your money is now automatically split into two stack, one of which corresponds exactly to the sum required to bribe your interlocutor. Only, sometimes, your money outright disappears from your inventory. Or becomes un-interactable. Also, the whole inventory has a tendency to re-organise itself at a whim. Side note: load weapon A; switch to weapon B; save; load your save; weapon A shoud now be empty. The game does not remember shit—somewhat surprising, since every texture and aspect of the game looks like it.
I talked to the boss of a faction. "Go kill that particular pipeworker," she says. Not a nano-second out of the conversation, some of her goons materialise out of the ether, telling me, "Hey we got a message from our faction
wink wink," before shooting me in the face. Certain that it's bug, I reloaded, and sure enough the same did not happen again.
I killed a boss, and took his key and looted his vault; yet his faction was still doing good, so good in fact that the boss was somehow alive again, though I did clearly recall making a huge hole in his face with flak ammo. So I killed him again, and got another key; and when next I checked, the haphazard amalgamation of pixel that passes for a map in this game alerted me to the fact his faction was still not destroyed, and that we were on neutral terms. Tell you what, that guy knows two things: the best doctor in town, and how to forgive.
I fell through the floor of the world three times. I also went out-of-bounds four times. Hard crash to desktop two times.
The mini-map has these little symbols which, by playing, I've learned indicate the presence of certain vendors. Only, I've seen multiple places where the symbol is there on the mini-map, but there's no one. I suppose it's there because, at one point in the game, a vendor should move to this place? But then, it shouldn't be there
until there's someone. Or perhaps, like almost everything else, it's a bug.
I enlisted the help of two companions, then latter swung by where I had first met them to talk to a merchant—and I noticed that my companions were with me, but also,
right there. As in 'now there are multiple of them'. Curious to see how it might break the game, I enlisted those doppëlgangers (fully functionnal), then went away, then came back, and sure enough two more doppëlgangers had appeared. I ended up with five copies of each of these two companions following me before the absolute mess I was witnessing bored me. By the by, is there a way to dismiss companions? If so, I have not found it. And they seem impervious to any damage I might wish to inflict upon their fascinating, ever-duplicating selves, so there went that potential solution.
And I could go on for what would be the length of an essay. Suffice to say that the world is empty (or rather: filled with nothing), lifeless, and uninteresting, and its traversal is a chore that, in twenty hours of play, has revealed nothing of interest to me. The entire UI is a mess, and the game has a tendency to chug. Everything in this game is a mess. By comparison, even Pathfinder: Wrath Of The Righteous is the veritable pinacle and utmost exemplar of polished, bug-free code. I rarely regret buying a game, but Mechajammer? Damn... It has joined the very, very select club of games so bad I can't even finish them. If ever I see the names of its developpers attached to anything, I'll be sure not to buy it. If one day I see them selling toothpicks, I'll suspect said toothpicks will change their appearance 23 times before reaching my teeth, then explode and give me aids.
Oh, you know what? I have to say the soundtrack is beyond great. Kevin Balke did a stupendous job creating an atmosphere; the track titled Calitana's Pulse in particular is haunting. Another track, Mayflower Initiative, makes me yearn for a game that might play as well as the track sounds. I'm sincerely saddened that such fantastic work is attached to the terrible mess known as Mechajammer.
There are probably a substantial number of people who post in this forum who would think Whalenought may have just accidentally solved the problem of degenerative save scumming.
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