He sounded a bit like Ray Winstone, complained about the new model robot floating around yonder, and when I asked if I could have his power cell he refused, because it sounded like dying to him, and he didn't want to do that. One puzzle involved getting the power cell out of the back of an old recycling robot. Most importantly though, they were so imaginative that solving them wasn't a chore - a means to an end, where the end is usually a further puzzle - but a joy in itself. The puzzles were hard enough to be satisfying and make me feel like a smarty pants, but logical enough that I didn't need to use the walkthrough provided for thicky journalists. The characters were fun and often genuinely funny, most especially the robots, who all have that curious quirk of being self-aware and having personality, which is a terrible thing for a creator to do to a robot. And while characters can prefix some things with "I already told you-", you do end up in little conversational loops sometimes.īut those (fairly substantial, I suppose) niggles aside, Beyond A Steel Sky did some very good things. But some bubbles appear yellow and some white, which I think relates to how important they are to the tasks you've got on the go - and yet they seem to switch around without my having really done anything. Talking to characters brings up yer little word bubbles with potential topics, and I've worked out that a little green arrow appearing in the corner of one means you've learnt something that has opened up further options in that topic. The dialogue system is also a bit opaque to navigate. Fun as it is to watch Foster occasionally float across the floor instead of walking, I can't put my hand on my heart and say that Beyond A Steel Sky is ready for it's debut ball just yet. Others treat floor level as a general suggestion, rather than a hard rule.
One character, a cheerful delivery driver, demonstrated tremendous thigh strength, requiring only that his chair be 6 foot away in any direction in order to take his ease in mid air. But it also means more can bugger itself up. This game is 3D, with a distinctly Telltale or Borderlands kind of look (or, I suppose, those games have a distinctly kind of Beneath A Steel Sky look), which does make it more fun to run around the different areas. Beyond is currently sitting on Steam with a "coming soon" release date, and I hope they give themselves plenty of time before locking a firmer date in, because the animation in particular is clearly a work in progress. I should say from the off that this was a very preview-y preview build. Also, children are being kidnapped from the surrounding desert and smuggled into the city by night. "Wellbeing" sends people round to check on you if you take too many days off work. "Comfort" covers custodial duties, for example. I'm pretty sure even the most technophobic rube, on witnessing Foster telling Joey the robot to just "make everyone happy" before leaving Union City, ostensibly forever, would sagely remark "Ye fucked that up, lad," without even removing the ear of corn from their mouth.Īnd as it turns out, by the time you rock back up again, Joey has apparently disappeared, the citizens praise him like some sort of god, and the city is ruled over by a council of five extremely suspicious people, each responsible for one aspect of life. lengthy, and takes the form of a comic strip). The preamble catches you up on the plot of Beneath and sets up some of Beyond (the preamble is. That aftermath is pretty predictable, I think. Now, years later, Foster is dealing with the aftermath. The game's traditionally rubbish, genre staple name is actually a hangover from the game to which this is a sequel, Beneath A Steel Sky, where gruff everyman Robert Foster and his AI robot pal Joey freed a city-state from the clutches of its evil AI overlord.
I'm not a big one for early previews myself, but having played the demo for Beyond A Steel Sky, the new pointy-clicky 3D adventure game from Revolution Games, I will concede that it was an hour and a half of my time well spent on puzzles and robots and hacking.īeyond A Steel Sky is set in a sort of Mad-Max-meets-cyberpunk dystopian mash-up from Charles "Broken Sword" Cecil, and famous comics artist Dave "Watchmen" Gibbons.
0 kommentar(er)
