That lack of guidance was uncanny, and still feels quite alien, but thinking back I can fondly remember a time where I’d put weeks into a game because I didn’t have another to play… I learned my way around Ahm, and The Hub, and Shadowrun‘s Seattle through repetition. It felt purely procedural, like it was a situation that was spat out by a machine, but the whole design of the city is deliberately spacious and flooded with shortcuts and paths that you simply have to learn or happen upon.

I snuck in - feeling completely out of my depth - and wound up making an alliance with a gang leader. I ended up following it under the city, through overgrown wastes and past mutated dogs until I popped up to the side of a bottling plant. I’ve played a little over 30 hours of it now, and while some of the earliest hours were expended on bugs that are now fixed, the whole thing can be whittled down to either extreme of wondering where I was and why this area was like it was, or being incredibly tense in the dangerous, imploding city.Īt one point I was exploring slightly outside of an area that I had grown familiar with, I was popping locks, busting doors, and crushing rats and other pests when I happened upon a cordoned-off area. There’re no middle-grounds there, it is one extreme or the other, empty or full, and that carries through almost every element of Mechajammer‘s design. Its roads are either streaked with vehicles or burning with fighting gangs and oppressive government forces. It floods with homeless beggars who cluster in swarms around districts, flooding them at different times of the day. Shadowrun‘s murky streets and alleyways occasionally pockmarked with a train station, office or club and Syndicate‘s wide-seeming city districts, have been exploded into a city that feels both dense and hollow, both alien and strangely familiar at the same time.Ĭalitana as a planet is broken. Mechajammer‘s world is better realised than both of those old worlds, in fact, it feels like somebody has taken those old games and - ironically, in the case of Shadowrun (SNES) - created a wide, cRPG world within those settings. All of this carries through to Mechajammer, with its mutants, droids, chaotic gangs and syndicates. There’s also a theme of transhumanism, be that the science or the practice. There are some similarities between the two games, Shadowrun and Syndicate, both take place in worlds that are inherently broken, operated and run by faceless corporations who no longer care for the humans that make them up, and who thrive on chaos and violence. However, it’s two old SNES games that it really reminds me of and that I compare it to the most. Its influences, which include the likes of Escape from New York and The Terminator, run deep through it. How I describe Mechajammer to people has changed a lot over the last while, and only a part of that is due to the major patches that have already been pushed live to fix some of the launch issues. Calitana is already imploding, and it’ll soon be exploding too You’ve got to get the hell out.

The only things scrubbing away at the grime is the unsustainable cycle of corruption and death, that and the fires from the open rioting and fighting that floods the streets. Mechajammer‘s Calitana is a grungy world stuffed with the dregs of a crime-ridden society.

Mechajammer reviews