The Technomancer: An Interesting Experience

The Technomancer does so much right and so much wrong, but it does not appear they have built on their previous failed effort in Mars: War Logs from 2013. For such a small studio, they really did well to release such an ambitious project. In terms of scope, the studio did very well, pushing ideas and concepts you’d likely find in expensive AAA titles into their own. When you begins exploring the world, there is so much to love, which makes reviewing this title incredibly difficult.

The game looks great, and often plays great. The worlds you explore are engaging and interesting, the story line is strong enough to pull you through even the worst moments of the game. The game wanted to be a big AAA release, competing with other big titles for your hard earned money. For that reason, and that reason alone, I hope they succeed. While the game is
far from perfect, the ambitiousness of this small studio to do something grand should be rewarded.

Unfortunately, it probably won’t be because of how many problems exist. Some are straight up game breaking glitches, while others are just things that sound great in concept, but not in execution.

To the glitches first. I experienced a fairly big glitch during my review play through where, because of they way I followed through on quests and character conversations, I was locked out of moving forward in the main story. A patch has been released to fix that issue, but because of the time I would have had to wait, I just started over again. It was probably a good move, because some people are still reporting issues getting past that point; apparently, the release day patch did not address
that, and other, concerns.

The other big problem in this title is the combat. The game forces you to use one of three combat stances, and while all are fun on their own, and although the idea seems great on paper, the execution within battles is pretty bad. Transitioning from the various modes is fairly clumsy, and eventually I learned to just fight as much as possible with one stance. Whether you are playing as the Warrior, Guardian, or Rogue, the combat looks a lot better than it plays.

We will have a full review of the Technomancer when it is complete. While we applaud the studio for working on an ambitious project, ones left to wonder how much more polished a much smaller game could have been. As of right now, the game has a fairly lowly Metacritic score of 58%. It wants to be so much more, but unfortunately, isn’t.