The Technomancer Review

The Technomancer, the newest RPG from Mars: War Logs developer Spiders, looked like exactly what I want from an RPG. It’s sci-fi, set on Mars, with lots of options on how to solve situations backed up with fluidic animations when things take an aggressive turn - which they often do. This is exactly why I was very excited to play Technomancer: I don’t often want to dive right into an RPG but all the promotional material I saw made it look great.

After a brief exposition dump explaining that you are playing Zachariah, a technomancer - sci-fi electricity wizard - working for the military of a water corporation on Mars, you are dropped into a conversation with Scott, a scientist and father-figure. Scott is an alcoholic, and his dialogue reflects that, with his thoughts being incomplete and tangents trailing off. Unfortunately this makes Scott a very difficult person to converse with, which is annoying because he’s a central character.

He’s not the only character with bad dialogue: most of the companions have either poor writing, poor acting or a mix of both. I spent as much of the game as I could with the two characters who were least often cringey, but that didn’t stop me skipping through a lot of the total dialogue in the game because the NPCs were speaking poor, broken English. If this was intentional to represent the disconnect between Mars and Earth, I really wish they hadn’t done this because it ruined what was otherwise a really enjoyable story.

Don't worry, he's only sleeping

The story is excellent; there’s lots of different arcs that create a very deep world, and your actions throughout the game can and will affect how groups and companions assist you, particularly towards the conclusion of the game. For example, one of the companions chose to leave the group and force me to fail a side quest that was associated with her because I had asked for help from a group that they didn’t like. I really don’t want to talk about the details of the story because it can be a little see-through, but that doesn’t make it any less engaging when you’re actually playing it. There is also the potential to romance at least two of the companions, and the character I romanced said legitimately the funniest line in the game and I’m so glad that she had strong writing and a good voice.

The Technomancer heavily relies on its story to get it through the weaker parts of its design. and its biggest weakness is the balancing of the combat. There are three melee classes - which are switchable on the fly - and these are supported by the technomancy powers. I chose to play with the warrior stance, which uses a staff to perform sweeping area of effect attacks, though I could have used the rogue stance utilising a blade, gun and poison, or the guardian stance wielding a small shield and club.

There are several things wrong with the balancing: firstly, the enemies will juggle you between knock downs and staggers with no time to dodge incoming attacks. Animations are generally too long, and it took me a long time to work out when it was ok to cancel any of them with the dodge ability. This gets very frustrating with the large monsters, who deal a lot of damage and knock you down with most attacks, or the soldiers with guns who stagger you with every hit so you lose half your health bar before you land a hit. You can do this to the enemies in return, but only to one and only while you’re not having to deal with their friends.

Behold! A mess of pipes and broken metal

This is another issue: in my playthrough I could increase my defense through different items of clothing, but my max health remained at 100 from beginning to end. Meanwhile, I’m smacking even the lowliest of enemies for hundreds to knock them out. This disconnect between how much damage you, as a trained super-powered soldier, take and how much the insects that inhabit the dirty corners of the streets can withstand is the complete opposite of the power fantasy I’d expected. I’m perfectly fine with not one-shotting enemies, but when standard grunts are pretty evenly matched against the elite of an army, I feel that something has gone wrong.

Finally, and this was a problem I saw almost exclusively with enemies using the guardian stance, dodging needed to be frame perfect. So many times, all throughout the game, I dodged an incoming attack only to be still hit by a flying enemy who had locked on just before my dodge. I’d be fine with this as a quirk of the combat system if I could also abuse it, but the AI seemed to possess the ability to cancel the dodge animation with a dodge animation, allowing them to be pushed against a wall and still avoid all damage.

That said, when you find and pull off a great combo time after time Technomancer is incredibly satisfying. I found a great one for taking down heavily armoured grunts involving an electrified punch that reduces their defences to 25% followed by an attack that involves swinging the staff around quickly, giving a lot of strong hits in an area around Zach. I found mixing the technomancy powers with the warrior style exceptionally strong once highly levelled, although at no point did I want to play through the combat on anything but easy.

You could say that this attack was shocking

The technomancy powers fall into two categories: straight up damaging abilities and long term buffs. The damaging abilities vary from a multi-hit lightning strike to a charged up bomb attack which stuns any enemies in the area before exploding. The buffs include additional damage to your attacks that has a chance to apply a stun, and a shield which reduces damage and pushes enemies away from you. All of these use Fluid, which is a slowly recharging energy system that I can only compare to the reversal system from WWE 2K16. The long term buffs take up a Fluid slot for their duration, while the instant cast use up the Fluid and begin to recharge immediately.

All of this can be upgraded in one of the three tech trees: every level you receive a point for the skill tree which gives new passive and active combat abilities. This tree is split into four sections, one for each combat stance and technomancy. This system made it so I didn’t want to switch out of the warrior stance after I started upgrading that stance, and I only switched to the rogue stance to kill one certain enemy type. Every few levels, you receive an upgrade to the attributes tree, which give you more overarching buffs to damage in each of the four combat styles. Each style has five ranks, and you gain 12 points to put in this tree. Finally, there is the talents tree, which gives you non-combat skills and dialogue options. These can also increase your relationship with your companions, which in turn makes them do more damage.

All of the areas in The Technomancer are big, expansive and rich in life, but they have strange choke points which slow the flow of the game right down. This is another case of the animations being too long, though it’s more that you don’t regain control until several seconds after the animation has ended. I thought that these might be loading times, but I’ve aggroed enemies on the other side of a door on a few occasions, which has meant that I’ve not been able to even open the door. The areas are also densely packed and tight for space, which makes sense in the context of the setting but can be very annoying when fighting in the streets. Several main story quests require you to fight in a market, and on the sight of combat all the non-aggressive NPCs freeze up and cower in fear. They’re all still solid though, so they just get in the way of dodges and ranged attacks and make those sequences very frustrating.

Effectively, Zach is just a supercharged bug zapper

The loading times are also very long, and while I would say that this makes sense due to the sheer size of the levels, half the time I saw people crossfade in before my eyes as the game loaded them on the fly. At several points after a loading screen, the game would still be loading the level geometry and I would see flickers of objects loading in across the map. I also had a massive framerate drop in every cutscene that takes place in the rover, sometimes to a complete standstill for several seconds, though the rest of the game ran very smoothly.