Picked this up yesterday for ?20 from Simply Games as was quite curious to see what it was like.
So,first impressions are pretty good. Visually, it's lush. Really, really impressive. Playing the Xbox version and, despite the very odd and slight slow down, this is one of the prettiest games I've played on the system. From the very outset it's just lush. And once you get to the city and start flying around, it just gets better. Especially the differing districts which all have their own theme. So yes, visually it's a belter.
The actual game itself reminds me of a more freeform, robotic Beyond Good and Evil for some reason. Perhaps it's the visuals, or the designers behind it (not too sure but I think it was made in Spain), but it has a certain charm to it that fantasy games not developed by English speaking nations seem to have.
Anyway, only played about an hour of it, but so far it's piqued my interest to play more. There looks to be an absolute shed load of things to do, Freedom to move round the city is easy enough, with each district linked by a subway, and then you can just get on your hover ship and fly around, blasting at people or doing what you like. The main story starts you off as a new robot, fresh to the city and given a job as a reporter. Your first assignment is to take pictures of the recently killed Grand Bishop and then it goes from there with cover ups and conspiracies driving it onwards.
From this little play, their seems to be a wealth of customisation option as you actually get to build your hovercraft, kinda like the custom mode in F Zero GX. Obviously, you need to earn money, and complete bets for the Crazy Gambler to get these parts but there seems like an awful lot of empty slots in the building mode, so I guess this is going to get padded out.
Oh, and one other thing is you can take the role of any type of robot in the game. The have this thing called the Great Database which holds the blueprint of every robot in the city (so if you die, they just make a copy from your stored data). This allows you to become any type of robot, police, banker, bishop - anything. Obviously, different missions are going to need the usage of different identities. But there are scanner robots that scan anything that comes near them. Get scanned too long and your cover gets blown. Not sure how frustrating this may become later on but it's no biggie so far.
So yes, so far so good. It's big, lovely to look at, lots going on and controls nicely, both on foot and in the air. My only small niggle is no first person view, which is a shame as this is one game where it really does feel good to stand and gawp at the towering structures all around.
So,first impressions are pretty good. Visually, it's lush. Really, really impressive. Playing the Xbox version and, despite the very odd and slight slow down, this is one of the prettiest games I've played on the system. From the very outset it's just lush. And once you get to the city and start flying around, it just gets better. Especially the differing districts which all have their own theme. So yes, visually it's a belter.
The actual game itself reminds me of a more freeform, robotic Beyond Good and Evil for some reason. Perhaps it's the visuals, or the designers behind it (not too sure but I think it was made in Spain), but it has a certain charm to it that fantasy games not developed by English speaking nations seem to have.
Anyway, only played about an hour of it, but so far it's piqued my interest to play more. There looks to be an absolute shed load of things to do, Freedom to move round the city is easy enough, with each district linked by a subway, and then you can just get on your hover ship and fly around, blasting at people or doing what you like. The main story starts you off as a new robot, fresh to the city and given a job as a reporter. Your first assignment is to take pictures of the recently killed Grand Bishop and then it goes from there with cover ups and conspiracies driving it onwards.
From this little play, their seems to be a wealth of customisation option as you actually get to build your hovercraft, kinda like the custom mode in F Zero GX. Obviously, you need to earn money, and complete bets for the Crazy Gambler to get these parts but there seems like an awful lot of empty slots in the building mode, so I guess this is going to get padded out.
Oh, and one other thing is you can take the role of any type of robot in the game. The have this thing called the Great Database which holds the blueprint of every robot in the city (so if you die, they just make a copy from your stored data). This allows you to become any type of robot, police, banker, bishop - anything. Obviously, different missions are going to need the usage of different identities. But there are scanner robots that scan anything that comes near them. Get scanned too long and your cover gets blown. Not sure how frustrating this may become later on but it's no biggie so far.
So yes, so far so good. It's big, lovely to look at, lots going on and controls nicely, both on foot and in the air. My only small niggle is no first person view, which is a shame as this is one game where it really does feel good to stand and gawp at the towering structures all around.
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