Loopmancer Review: A mix of madness, action and kitsch
A riot of violence, bizarre and action in a solid but not essential Roguelike: our experience with Loopmancer.
In the very first hours spent in the company of Loopmancer you have time to change your mind about the game at least a dozen times. eBrain Studio, the development team, immediately puts a lot, a lot on fire in a rather confusing way, and it is therefore entirely possible that the reactions and feelings of the player change significantly from one moment to the next, whenever you taste for the first time one of the very savory ingredients poured into the cauldron.
The game is cloaked in roguelike subtleties and then it breaks down into the most vulgar and visceral action builds a fascinating cyberpunk context and then demolishes it with ideas ranging from kitsch to the purest trash, tries to create a narrative focused on themes dear to the futuristic genre and then throws away any pretense of seriousness, between gang wars, corporate delusions, lewd experiments and all sorts of inventions that could help raise the rate of general madness and discomfort.
You almost get lost in this glittering succession of strangeness and bizarre, playful as well as conceptual, but slowly it re-emerges, you get to see clearly and put together the pieces of a production that is however fiercely inconsistent. Not only do we come to terms with the particularity, but we embrace it, and it is then that we find the raison d’etre: Loopmancer is everything we have just described and more, and that’s fine. With a strong and at the same time terribly naive identity, it cannot leave you indifferent.
The same story every day
It all begins when private detective Xiang Zixu is called to investigate the disappearance of a popular journalist, and daughter of the mayor of Dragon City a Chinese megalopolis with fascinating views (especially with active ray tracing) which is the main theater of the events narrated.
Obviously, his search starts from one of the most infamous places in the city, so he has to punch his way, bottle, gunshot and whatever is necessary to get rid of the thugs of the local gang. But just when he is about to catch the boss, who should know something about the mysterious disappearance and who among other things is an old enemy of Xiang, the good detective is punctured by a hail of bullets. Curtain. Dark. “Driiin“, wakes her up. Xiang’s very personal version of the day of the groundhog begins. Dead is really dead, when they made him sieve, but it is not known how the event triggered a time loop. Each departure brings with it a resurrection, and the investigation restarts with the new elements available that man gradually obtains.
It is the perfect excuse to allow the narrative to frolic, throwing the detective, and with him the player, in a succession of events decidedly outside the box, because from an almost hard boiled starting point, which reeks of alleys full of piss, noodles of soy and cigarette smoke, it borders in the very short term in a “locura” which includes cybernetic ninjas, proud but slightly jerky samurai, hand-torn brains, organ trafficking, centenarian old women, mad scientists and more.
Does it make sense, overall? Probably not a lot, but it doesn’t matter, because this pot pourri of situations, inspirations and themes all in all titillates the desire for trash that resides in each of us. The thing I like most, however, is the fact that choosing one level instead of another also has important repercussions on the plot, complete with multiple endings. It is therefore clear that certain choices are better than others, and why they are can only be discovered by playing.
How was your day? You’re covered in blood
Playing, in fact. The loop mechanism obviously also deeply connotes the play systemwhich in its general characteristics is that of a side-scrolling action platform, in which all that needs to be done is to kill anyone who comes in front of it and, occasionally, to solve some simple environmental enigma.
Style and graphics Technically, the game thrives on ups and downs. The overall composition of the scene is excellent, thanks to an appreciable (albeit stereotyped) artistic direction and a wise use of colors and, above all, of lighting: ray tracing is practically a must, but sustainable from the point of view of frame rate only using NVIDIA’s DLSS. The rest, from polygonal modeling to textures, certainly doesn’t scream a miracle, yet the speed of the action overshadows everything. The sound accompaniment is rather negligible, while the dubbing is of sure impact, but not for the right reasons: definitely over the top and sometimes out of focus.
Xiang strikes like a blacksmith and shoots like a madman, and that’s enough to inject the endorphins of intense and frenetic, angry and violent, physical and bloody action into the player’s synapses. Loopmancer is constantly projected forward, consistently with the overwhelming advance of the detective who, even net of some imperfections of a combat system that is not always fully decipherable (for example with enemies who sometimes suffer certain hits and on other occasions they don’t even hear them , or with dodges from a slightly too wide radius), it is always as delightful as it is scenographic. The tools of death at Xiang’s disposal are many and quite varied, distinguished between melee weapons, firearms, gadgets and special powers. Initially you have the most basic ones available, but at each loop you can enrich your arsenal: around the maps there are special distributors, with a certain number of credits you can open them and make the tool they contain available at certain retailers found around the levels.
Thanks to that roguelike element for which with each death all (or almost …) credits are lost while the unlocked weapons remain such (as well as the skills of a rather banal selection), the typical progression of the genre takes shape: even the most unfortunate loops can represent progress, provided you think carefully about which tools and upgrades to invest.
Not everything is always well managed, the location of the distributors is random and these are perhaps too expensive, but this also produces a positive effect: making a virtue of necessity, getting by with the most easily accessible weapons and gadgets and varying your style of play. As a consequence of what has just been described, we end up coming to terms even with the challenge level, calibrated upwards even for minor difficulties. These are the flaws that unfortunately prevent the gaming experience from elevating further, and we would have liked that the enjoyment and intense fighting was combined with an equally satisfying feeling of progression. None of these stumbles, in any case, weakens the charge of involvement transmitted by the production too much, and therefore the ten hours necessary to complete it (taking into account, however, the deaths and the various ramifications, otherwise even just a single run is sufficient. two hours), however, passes with discrete pleasure.
