#Cloudpunk review driver#
#Cloudpunk review android#
#Cloudpunk review series#

But while Rania tries to keep her head down and her nose clean, Hayse prefers a much more hedonistic and self-destructive lifestyle.

#Cloudpunk review series#

As with Rania, he flies a series of barely connected package deliveries. Just as these strands emerge and start to come together, the game abruptly switches focus to Hayse once more.Īssuming control of Hayse is like starting the game over. Sent by a debt corporation looking to extract payment, or at least send a message to other welshers, the assassin is carving a bloody swath through anyone Rania has contact with, trying to catch up with her. At about the same time, an assassin droid named Archo arrives on Rania's trail. As a result of her work with CORA, certain powerful parties in the city are searching for Rania and send a representative from Curzona, a rival delivery service with a fatal way of dealing with those who say no to them, to recruit her. It took the first four of the game's nine-hour play time – just slightly shorter than the original's ten – for things to come into focus for Rania and Camus. The result is a series of assignments that, while interesting in their own right, feel a bit like disjointed leftovers that didn't make the cut in the first game. This time there's no such underlying narrative scraps connecting everything together. References to that mystery wended their way through most of Rania's early deliveries, hinting at the much larger tale still to unfold. In the original Cloudpunk, who or what CORA was proved to be a popular topic of speculation for most people in Nivalis. Unfortunately, City of Ghosts isn't as deft at drawing players in as its predecessor. From being the personal shopper for a high-class woman entertained by the prospect of getting fashion tips from one of the downtrodden, to flying all around the city as a tour guide for a group of wealthy, bored hackers who have tapped into the video feed from her HOVA, to delivering a hallucinogen that she herself gets a whiff of, Rania certainly has a knack for packing a lot into a single work shift. Again the game starts with a variety of unrelated odd jobs for a group of eclectic characters.

#Cloudpunk review android#

Having migrated from being a HOVA AI to inhabiting an android dog shell, Camus is still able to speak and, in his naivete, often still perceives events far clearer than Rania herself.Īs before, Rania is still flying her HOVA, doing package drop-offs for the illicit delivery service Cloudpunk. Fortunately, her ever-faithful and spirited sidekick Camus is still tagging along, and even becomes a playable character for a couple of brief segments. In the two months since then, she's become noticeably more cynical and sarcastic. As she looks about the city, with its continued slide into chaos, she wonders if anything she did with CORA made a difference.

Although familiar to players already, her time in Nivalis since we last saw her has made her a very different Rania. But he intends to follow Hayse around all night to prevent him from fleeing justice and to incarcerate him first thing in the morning.Īfter a brief playable prologue with Hayse, the game returns to more familiar territory as the narrative shifts over to Rania. Not right away, though, as the bot doesn't officially start with the CorpSec police force until the next day. Matters don't improve much when the robot Morpho shows up to arrest him. Since he owes money to more than a few ticked-off citizens looking to collect, it seems like Hayse isn't long for this world.

#Cloudpunk review driver#

No one knows this better than Hayse, a down-on-his-luck, profanity-spewing former Cloudpunk driver who indulges in whatever booze and drugs he can get his hands on. In these lower levels, it seems everyone's out for themselves and the only way to get ahead is to screw everyone else. The rich still live above the clouds, while the rest of society dwells in the perpetual gloom and rain beneath. Set two months after the events of the original game and Rania's fateful encounter with CORA, little has changed in the decaying city. While this substantial downloadable expansion is even more talkative than the base Cloudpunk game, the new characters and an extra layer of polish on the already impressive production values make for an engaging return to the entropy-gripped metropolis of Nivalis.

This time out, however, the story isn't theirs alone as ION LANDS' 3D voxel-based Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts introduces a new playable character named Hayse, along with his robot frenemy and would-be Corpsec officer Morpho. Rania is back, with her android canine Camus and new hovercraft AI.