Sunday, May 19, 2024
I just finished playing the game Cloudpunk. I had high hopes for it. It’s a great looking game. Released in 2020, Cloudpunk is “A neon-noir story in a rain-drenched cyberpunk metropolis. It’s your first night on the job working for the Cloudpunk delivery service. Two rules: Don’t miss a delivery and don’t ask what’s in the package.”
The premise of the game is simple. You’re a delivery driver, flying a HOVA to various destinations within the game. Your goal is to get to the location and deliver the package to your customer. Most missions are easy. There are a few missions that are timed, but the outcome of the mission isn’t essential to complete the game.
The location is a city called Nivalis, and from in-game exposition and dialogue, you’re told that it’s one of the last cities on this planet. Many of the individuals you meet in the game are androids or artificial persons, instead of human beings. Your companion is CAMUS, a talking augmented artificial intelligence who identifies as a dog.
What I noticed right away is how fun it is to drive a flying car through the city. Controls are simple, the usual W-A-S-D plus shift and space to move up and down. Everything in the game is rendered as cubes, which probably saves a bit on processing speed. It’s a huge open-world environment, so there’s a lot of data for the computer to juggle. The buildings look great and straight out of Blade Runner. You’re given a sense of distance and space with strategic use of lighting and transparencies.
The characters, however, are a different story. The game relies on ‘voxels’ for the objects you interact with in the game. This works fabulously for the buildings and structures, but not the NPC characters. When you compare them with how the rest of the game looks, it’s jarring how ugly they are.
It's dialogue-heavy for no good reason. Every character you talk to will have a conversation with you that you can’t skip through, and some of them aren’t really relevant to finishing the story.
You also have to gas up the HOVA and repair it every once in a while, depending upon how bad of a driver you are.
The base game is an oddly short story for such a huge world. It feels like developers spent a lot of time on building Cloudpunk’s environment and not enough time to work on the story inside this environment. Considering all the flying around that’s essential to complete the game, there are many areas in the game that have nothing in them.
Total game play for me was 35.5 hours, and I spent a lot of time looking around for punch cards and other items.
Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts
The DLC (downloadable content) for this game was released in 2021: Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts. It promises to be as long of a story as the base game, and has more meaningful plot direction based upon your choices in the game.
One thing I noticed right away was that they’ve worked to make the characters more realistic. The cubes used for the faces are smaller and there’s an attempt to control shading so that they look more like rendered faces instead of Minecraft monsters. The character movement slideshow is still very short, so they’ll do the same thing about five times in a long conversation.
There’s a better interface for your HOVA. The base game only has a fuel indicator, no damage indicator. The DLC has a fuel indicator to tell you when to gas up, and a damage indicator to tell you when it’s time to repair the vehicle.
Gameplay is quite a bit darker than the original base game. Our original main character gets into trouble and has to resolve it with help from some new characters.
Just like with the base game, there’s way too much talking. The interactions with the NPCs are tedious. More than once I had to wait impatiently for a conversation to end so I can get on with playing the game.
The story and its resolution in the game left me feeling decidedly meh. I just didn’t care about the characters or what happened to them, aside from CAMUS, the Automata dog.
This game might have been better if there were more missions that were just deliveries, without some kind of story attached to them. Driving a flying car through a city, avoiding obstacles, getting to locations on time – that was fun. Slogging through the story was less so. The final insult was the five-minute long credit sequence that also can’t be skipped through.
Don’t waste your money buying this at retail – wait until it’s on sale.
