Cloudpunk Review (PS4)

Maybe one of the best things about Cyberpunk 2077, beyond the game itself, is that it reminded developers that gamers have a special place in their hearts for the cyberpunk subculture. Seeing the hype built in recent years around CD Project Red’s next major project, a lot of games ended up with this futuristic sci-fi setting as the canvas on which they tell their stories. One of them is Cloudpunk, a game that offers a glimpse into the life of a courier above the clouds while trying to answer almost deep questions about what it means to be human.

You will take on the life of Rania, an outsider forced to move to Nivalis, a busy megapolis that bever sleeps. You will be given a flying car, a HOVA, that helps you earn a living, but also represents the means to escape your past. Cloudpunk depicts the first night of our protagonist in a visually stunning world, trying to navigate not just the avenues of the metropolis, but also the social hierarchy governing this futuristic world. The humans, androids, and AIs are all living together in a decaying environment, with a lot of tension caused by the structure of the society. During the roughly eight to ten hours story, you will discover several tragedies hidden in the shadows cast by the blinding neon commercials of the city.

The game developed by Ion Lands chooses to focus on the more philosophical aspect of the cyberpunk culture, completely removing violence from the equation. Many times you will feel a simple witness to what is going on, at first glance powerless to make a difference. But just by listening and caring about others, you will have the chance to enact change through peaceful means. Driving around and delivering not quite legal packages, having conversations with countless colorful characters, and musing about the events with your faithful automaton, you will end up uncovering Nivalis’ secrets and you will bring on change by the power of choice.

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It is quite hard to pinpoint Cloudpunk into a single genre, since it combines masterfully elements from both adventure and driving games, without putting too much pressure on you. An outsider employed by Cloudpunk to settle your debts, you become an underground courier of the city, the role evolving pretty quickly because you are the only one that listens to the problems of those around you.

Your job will have you explore the slums and the fancy skyscrapers, and everything in between. This translates into pretty relaxing, yet engaging gameplay: you will have to drive around with your Hova delivering various packages, and optionally engaging in conversations with the residents of the city. Also optionally you can gather different items, that are either required by some NPCs or can be sold to merchants to make your budget less limited.

The entire gameplay is in the service of the immersive atmosphere, the best quality of the game. Even though the tasks are rather simple, Cloudpunk makes you feel a part of a living cyberpunk world, navigating dirty and abandoned sewers or amazing vistas, almost expecting to run into Rick Deckard to put you through a Voight-Kampff test. The story, the characters, and the jokes along with every other aspect of the game were developed to create an atmosphere that will wash over you and engulf you like a blanket of mist.

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The graphics and the audio fit perfectly into this setting, completing the experience. There is something inescapably charming in cruising around the city during the night, in heavy rain, among neon commercials, listening to synthwave music. Thanks to the voxel graphics everything is very pixelated, bordering almost Minecraft, but the developers played so ingeniously with the illumination, that the cyberpunk atmosphere, in the end, is without a hitch.

Every area has its own distinctive looks, the slums almost completely eroded by the ocean being in sharp contrast with the loud clubs situated on the perches of the seemingly never-ending skyscrapers of the rich districts. The only constants are the luminous skyways, functioning just like the arteries of a human body, the vehicles representing the blood flow that the body cannot live without.

You will have the chance to explore many of the areas on foot and dive deeper into the world of Nivalis. As already said all the items you can collect around the city, just as the side quests you can undertake are optional. Most of the optional missions are quite limited in scope and can be finished by finding the necessary item or correct NPC, usually placed quite close to the quest giver. Still, if you get confused, you will find every point of interest marked on your map.

Since Cloudpunk is a story-driven game, the progress is made mainly through interactions with other characters. Beyond your usual contacts related to the main questline, you will meet all sorts of characters in need of your assistance. And this is the point where the game unravels and the experience is dented. The system does not manage to track accurately your conversations and this leads to a lot of errors. You will have different NPCs you will meet several times in different areas, each interaction supposedly different. Unfortunately, these NPCs tend to forget that they already talked with you, and instead of new information will repeat the initial dialogues. As a result some quests you can repeat without end, thus having an infinite and very easy income source.

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In other cases, you are entrusted with a task, such as introducing the correct keycode to unlock a passage. After doing so if you interact again with the NPC who offered you the code, the game will ask you to repeat the action, an impossible task since you already unlocked the aforementioned passage. As a result, you remain with an active quest and waypoint on the map and mini-map, you can’t get rid of. More of a nuisance, these things should have been avoided, especially that the forgetfulness of the NPCs can make you miss many of the secondary storylines.

Another problem is the traffic around the city and the control of your HOVA. While you can get used to the idea of navigating not only horizontally, but also vertically, the control of your flying car will feel cumbersome even after you install the available upgrades. Even more annoying is the traffic, the other drivers going around their business without any regard to you. This will result in you being hit by other cars, even if you drive carefully. This aspect puts another strain on your limited budget, next to fuel you being forced to spend money on repairs as well.

Your HOVA cannot be completely destroyed, but after several bumps into objects it will break down, losing speed and making steering even harder. The occasional framerate drops will only make it harder to avoid the surrounding traffic. Things are not improved by the peculiar choice of developers to rely solely on checkpoints, without a save/load system. The intent probably was to experience the game without revisiting your choices until a second replay.

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The Good

The Bad

Conclusion