Chapter One.
In which, i am talking about me. It is all about me. Me, me, me!
Blessed feces! After all these years, i’ve finally beat it. 
I was planning to do it one day, but with the insane tedium of the broken mechanics i was not very enthusiastic about it. Thinking about doing something, and actually doing it releases almost the same amount of positive hormones, but it is the same thing.
But while looking for something, i stumbled upon a video about the game that revealed a really good build, which can win it. After which i was craving to try it out for days, especially since i already have 1.8.0 remaster. I just gave in, and started a new game instead of finishing several other projects.
This is a very hard game to talk about. So this text is even more of a confused unfocused mess, than usual.
Playing the release version is literally not recommended to anyone. Anyone who wants this won’t listen to anyone’s recommendations anyway. Even with all the technical fixes and improvements of 1.8.0, which make this game run on modern systems, it is still utterly mechanically broken, and even the magic build is not a silver bullet. But it’s not like there’s no merit in it at all. Or is it? Let’s find out.
Chapter Two
In which there is the history of the game. Or at least the chapter was named as if there is.
Despite being one of the first projects of a tiny struggling company, AAA publisher Buka decided to work their arse off and promote the hell out of this game. The release has amazing cover art. The game was advertised as hard as it could. They lobbied it to get all the awards at all the awards shows. And MiST land South could not even bother to fix shooting and to add difficulty modes. Literally just 10x hero HP for normal and 100x for easy. Or was it all an 80s style ploy to pad a short game so it will take more hours?
I bought it soon after the release, and while i was without a PC again, and mine couldn’t run it, I lended it to my dawg and we played the beginning together. When i got a better PC i’ve tried to play it and reached the second stage. But it run extremely slowly and the difficulty is impossible if you are playing it the normal way. So i just lost my interest.
Normally i absolutely refuse to engage with bad hype and rumour mills around projects i write about. Because i don’t want to be influenced by an alien intervention into my thoughts, and because most of the meta is fleeting temporary garbage, which will be forgotten several years later. Just like this game with all its rewards. I write for myself to have off-site backups of my own thoughts. I write about the product, not about the surrounding it bouhourt of bad people. I only mention the zeitgeist of the time when it is absolutely relevant to the product or to me. JA Flashback is misrepresented by Steam, and maybe it suffers from the release problems. Meanwhile people praise oblout 76 and nomanski as redemption stories, despite them being not different at all! Are they Steve?
I bought the hype of this game on release. And despite it being barely playable i thought for years that this is one of the best games ever, until i’ve realised that opinions of other people do not matter and i mustn’t colour my thoughts because of peer pressure. And with a big distance from the dark ages of pre-Windows “console” gaming and score attack arcade games, my perception has changed. One cannot call a game “good” if they didn’t even bother to finish it. If it’s so good why didn’t you eat the turd in question, but just sniffed it from afar? A ton of games leave a great first impression, but they are insufferable in the second half. Would you listen to a positive review of a person who didn’t finish a movie? Or skipped around through it? A positive review of a person who never finished a book? Only negative reviews of unfinished things are legit, when properly disclosed.
Looking at the reviews of the time — none of those bullshit artists even finished it. A degenerate reviewer who doesn’t finish, at the very least, the main story, is like a cook who comes to you with a live rat, puts it on your head, and splatters it with a pan, then pours flour into your underwear, gives you cucumber seeds and spits on them, just because your ordered a hamburger. These “people” are literally paid to play games, and they can’t achieve even that, while still taking the money. If you can’t even finish the game, just give it a zero, and explain that it is unplayably hard. Or dead-bugged. Degenerate “professional” reviewers base their reviews on nothing. The majority of games frontloads the good stuff, and turns into tiresome garbage past 20%. Only ootoobers and user reviews have potential to be honest.
Gamespot and gamespy reviewers know absolutely nothing about this game. They never even reached the first real fight. No one talks about the insane difficulty, which only gets worse past the first stage.
Meanwhile all the players describe all the problems with everything in this game, even if they are fanboys unfairly praising it.
The kicker of those unstarted reviews, is that those paid clowns are outing themselves as absolute uncultured imbeciles. From calling this RPG a “strategy” (together with the most thorough reviewer from itc), then comparing it to UFP instead of Fallout, and, for dessert, to being mentally challenged and not understanding human speech. The voice barks are probably the best part of this thing, and these idiots question why the kooky crazy people of dystopian future don’t talk like reviewers’ senile boring cookie cutter mundane mums. They blame the translation, but from what i’ve heard on YouTube — it is a proper translation, instead of another racist “ghost stories dub”. Even if performed by aspiring actors, as opposed to the professional film and stage actors of the original.
Incompetent people have to be fired and banned from work they need to go homeless. They are paid to play games, not to work in a coal mine. And they fail to do even that, while also refusing to acquire a sufficient field of reference.
The review from Absolute Games is a self-important shit-post to surpass GAME.EXE And judging from the content the author never reached another location either. And then they gave the game 65%, which is 15% to the right of 50%. They have said that this game is 15% better than most of the games on earth in 2002. The playable Clive Barker’s Jericho got 58%
Speaking of GAME.EXE, that is another not-incompetent review, and it gave the game a high score, while in general they were generously giving average scores to extremely popular western fast food games. A review in the magazine the ads for which are plastered as product placement inside the original release version of the game. But the review explains why they gave it a very good score. It is a game with turn-based combat in a time when the reboot of UFO went real-time, and before ОSS came out. Also i think they rushed through the shortest way, with no side-quests, cutting down the annoyance a bit.
Recently i discovered that the game was remastered by some of the members of the original team in 2015 and released for free. So i tried to launch that version and it did run. Not to be confused with the fan-made game (or more like, a mod for the sequel) called “remaster”.
1.8.0 remaster mostly focuses on compatibility and on performance. The loading times are actually significantly shorter. And “hidden movement” is very fast. By accident i discovered an external exe for the settings. And it offers two easy difficulties and one hard difficulty. By default the game plays at the classic difficulty. Effing hell, if only i knew about it from the beginning. When i noticed it, i’d already finished the first stage.
Despite everything wrong with this game it gained a cult following. People to this day call it great, and replay it from time to time. Their dedication is such that some fans assembled a team and ported the original game to the engine of the (pr/s)equel, and remade the assets. The fan-made “remaster” came out II.2023 and it claims it has fixed the accuracy. There are a lot of mechanical differences, like finally allowing for real-time movement. The tech is still arse-awkwards, with the same resolution problem. The hidden movement is longer and buggier. The game crashes sometimes or hangs, and negatively influences explorer.exe
And the “remaster” has drastically different textures and designs. In some parts it looks way too clean and dark. There’s censorship with the new models. And there are absolute tons of fan-made voice acting. They even are trying to imitate the original actors for additional lines. In this game where idle characters repeat the same thing over and over and over again, you now will be hearing amateur volunteers recording their fan-written lines on a smartphone inside a toilet. For hours, for the entire duration of your playthrough.
I reckon mechanically it is a better game. But the atmosphere of the original game is the most worthy part of that art-piece, and it is grimy and magenta. The fan-remake doesn’t look like it belongs to the same world. And then the new voice-acting really grates your ear. Even if the gameplay is better, it’s still not that great.
With different gameplay and with different total presentation — it’s so different that it can’t supersede the original in any of the parts involved.
Chapter Three
In which there is an in-house engine, and crooked hands.
It’s an RPG with a hex-based TBT combat system. Like Fallout. But unlike Fallout there’s no overworld and it is always turn-based, even if you have no enemies. Including, talking, trading, looting etc, — everything spends your AP. I heard claims that this is not an obvious design oversight, but that their in-house engine was unable to calculate that many movements in real-time. Which means under the hood it runs even worse than WarCraft 2, no, even worse than Dune 2.
The fan game circumvents that by freezing the world and giving you infinite turns. Yes, it’s way more convenient. But the world is unalived.
The second most prominent problem with this game is the chance to hit. No chance. The guns shoot perpendicularly to the barrel. Your accuracy stats don’t matter. Both good and bad accuracy either sends bullets to the stratosphere, or they instantly drop to the ground. Having a 100% chance to hit means you have a 100% chance to miss. That is after all these patches which claim that they’ve improved shooting.<!— сравнение кдр 180 и мода стрельба—-Ю
That’s because your goons do not miss. They actually aim and hit what they are supposed to. The problem is that this game tells them that they are supposed to hit a point outside of the enemy’s hitbox. Every time you hit an enemy, it’s not a hit, it’s a lucky miss. This persists even when you shoot from a neighbouring hex. But at that distance there’s usually at least some intersection between the hitbox and the trajectory.
Wide robot spiders have this target outside of one of the legs. So even the characters that stand in the neighbouring tile will just shoot the floor instead of the centre of mass. You have to spend several AP to walk around the whole thing, so that the aim point will be on the line of fire. In many situations it’s better to force fire at an empty space behind an enemy. But bullets can fly between enemy’s legs.
The fan game handles the shooting way better, as seen on TV. And there’s a fake first person view for even better aim at sticking out appendages.
The game has insane amounts of strong enemies for your tiny underleveled unequipped team. And you are supposed to kill them all with your broken chance to hit. To make you happy, all the non-quest enemies respawn if you leave and return to a location. So you can’t clean one out, and you can’t pick the hostiles one by one, while running away to lick your incompatible with life wounds. You can’t be happier, happier is prohibited. So at some points of the story visited locations get drops of extreme amounts of upgraded enemies with heavy machinery. Against you six. If you manage to clean that out, a smaller number of upgraded enemies will continue to respawn on every re-visit.
You think you can farm respawning enemies to gain the levels fast? Killing them gives barely any XP compared to the requirements for the next level. First stage mobsters that can kill you with one bullet give you 40 exp, shared between all the members of your team. The levelling is extremely steep: 500-3000-7000-12500-20000-35000-60000-100500 (a-ha-ha)-150000
So while fighting the last boss my protagonist was at level 8. Most of the companions come already levelled, so they get like only 2-3 level-ups to end the game at level 5–6. Getting to 6-7 right before the final boss.
When a character dies, the loot spills out onto the street. And all the NPCs run towards it like cats towards food. Anything you didn’t pick up in the first couple of turns will be scavenged. Only big guns and useless armours remain. Yes, it is realistic and it fits the cyberpunk setting perfectly. But come on, you wanted that.
In the fan game NPCs are less aggressive, and with the new “real-time” mode they all freeze in place and can’t steal your things anymore.
Most ammo is separated into quarters when it falls out. And there’s no sort inventory button. So each time you have to do pixel hunt trying to stack the ammunition. And of course each quarter takes one AP to pick up. There are a lot of different types of ammunition, and inside one calibre a lot of variations look similar or basically the same.
A lot of the guns are big, your inventory is small, and you can’t rotate things. So hauling loot to sell takes a lot of time in the locations with vendors.
In the fan game the inventory is slightly bigger. They’ve added a connection between the rucksack and the second gun slot, which allows you to put two or three long(er) guns there. Also ammunition has more distinct colours.
If your inventory is full, the quest rewards (including quest items) just drop on the floor. If you leave and return to a location all the loot and bodies disappear. You better make sure you don’t forget any quest items.
There’s a very limited number of “chests” in the game and they look no different to non-interactive ones. You have to mouseover anything that looks hackable or lootable. You can store your stuff inside them if you are brave enough.
Some crates look like they belong to a vendor, but you can loot them without angering anyone. Some lootable crates are blocked by other crates. You can blow them up with a powerful grenade. Usually there’s only low level ammo inside, but at the factory there’s a very good sniper rifle in a blocked crate.
The game has free-fire chaos to surpass STALKER. Random bullets fly everywhere and can kill any quest NPC, or make entire factions hostile to you. You can use it to gain allies in battles, or to kill some marks without angering their faction. You hide behind the human shield and wait for cops to kill them. Many of the quests ask for a person to be dead, not for you to personally do that.
In the fan game that doesn’t work. First of all, NPCs of different factions work together to avoid hitting each other. And even when i managed to arrange for a mercenary to shoot a syndicate member, they didn’t start a war. Which is even more dumb if you consider the plot.
When you kill civilians you get an XP penalty. But many quests ask you to do exactly that.
Guns have a lot of meaningless stats. With the broken mechanics a half of them are useless. Damage is calculated by adding damage of the chosen ammo with damage of a chosen gun. The accuracy also takes both into account, but they display different variables, so who knows what is the formula for the final accuracy %. Game helpfully highlights matching ammo and guns. And both name the calibre in the description. But energy weapons say they use calibre 1.1, while the batteries are not marked as 1.1
There are different types of damage so you can increase your resists with implants. But the selection of implants is very small, so you can’t get good universal protection. Two most common damage types are physical and energy, and there is no protection against that. The cops love to use shock grenades, but i didn’t notice them doing anything dangerous. Only the early game drones can shock you good. And then, you can only add implants, you can’t remove them. So you better think of a proper build from the start. Unless you want to stack full intellect and grind a ton of levels to hack the final boss, the proper implant build is full strength. Maybe add a regenerator, but that’s not as important.
The armours protect different parts differently. Instead of showing you protection %, the stats instead are inverse. They show modifiers of incoming damage (damage × modifier), so lower is better.
Of course during idle animations your hit-boxes can clip through walls and get shot at. With fake verticality of this functionally 2D geometry, shooting through floors is the same as having no cover. Explosives damage through walls, even very thick ones.
Also because of the fake verticality you can’t go through empty arches. Why not just add one sprite of a grate?
To not to ruin your camera, or make your GPU render a ton of invisible garbage, this games renders the levels floating in the void. Instead of the traditional black skybox it actually uses textures. And, well, some levels are designed as being suspended up high. Could’ve used that to pretend that all the levels are on platforms, but i think they wanted the first stage to be on the very bottom, on the ground.
Usually level-designers add invisible walls near the edges. But there are none in this game. So if the enemies spam you with grenades, they actually overshoot and fall of the edge of the world.
Despite all the hacks to pretend that these flat levels have verticality, the pathfinding works perfectly. You just press where you want to go and your dudes run there. Most modern games struggle to calculate even three steps ahead. The characters even remember where they are supposed to go if they didn’t reach the destination in one turn. You can click your target hex on the other end of the map and then just skip turns with [Enter], watching your doods reaching it without your involvement. Which is especially good with 1.8.0’s fast loading times on the modern machines.
The game has most of the necessary hotkeys, but you can’t rebind them. Without forcing the game into windowed mode you can’t ever alt-tab, none of the Windows shortcuts is working. But in a window edge scrolling doesn’t work, since it doesn’t confine the cursor. The camera is moved by the arrow keys instead of modern [W][A][S][D]. [Shift]+[LMB] is to look in the specified direction. Double clicking can send your goon to the target tile without animation. But the rhythm is very specific, if you don’t match it the goon will stop in place. Pity there’s no option to turn off movement animations for your own troops.
The game has only eight (!) save slots, two of which are reserved for auto-save and quick-save. Dune 2 has at least more than a hundred save slots. Limiting save slots is a sign of bad development. Especially with modern sensibilities, when every second player pretends they are a reviewer, despite having zero views, and they would want to have a convenient save to use later to capture footage to illustrate a specific point in the script.
In the fan game there’re no autosaves for location change, and it sucks.
This role playing RPG game
Fallout uses S. P. E. C. I. A. L. ruleset. This game uses S. P. E. C. I. A. L. N. E. E. D. S. (СЛРТИВЗЗ / SDRAIDSH, actually)
Dexterity is responsible for conversion of action points into movement points. So a character with a lot of action points, but low dex can waste, like, 12 per hex. Strength is converted into action points. Yes. So increasing strength allows you to use some heavy guns, wear more armour and carry more stuff with a smaller penalty, shoot ten or more times per turn, and run from one end of the map to the other and back. Strength is everything.
Accuracy doesn’t matter. Even with perfect accuracy this game still runs exclusively on erroneousnessy.
So that “game breaking” build is spending the first five points to give hacker Hacker 80 dex for virtually the best conversion, and then dump everything else into strength. Meth-crack-runner is able to clean several enemies up close, and then find a full cover. You don’t need accuracy when you can use an automatic gun with a low AP cost per burst. The micro-UZI-looking thing has the cheapest burst and it is the best option until the armoured and assault cops show up. By that point you have griffin, which spends barely more AP than penta, but is way stronger. Especially with better ammo. It is useful basically until the very end.
People claim you can solo the game with the protagonist alone. You even get more EXP. But first of all that would be very boring. Second, you need a ton of firepower starting with the third stage. And the enemies also can run as good as you, starting with the third stage. Alone you have only your small backpack to haul loot for sale or for special occasions. And barely any big guns for hard fights.
Runner builds also allow you to navigate the levels and sell loot more efficiently. With a normal build you will need a lot of turns to assemble your team before departing, the runner just gets there, very pleasant STRIKE necessary build to use.
Reaction is responsible for interrupt fire. It is a staple in other games, but on average you see it, like, a ten times per playthrough. And Laika has it almost capped.
Looks like it is significantly improved in the fan game.
Intellect is needed for high tech guns and to hack. I think 50 IQ is supposed to be the average here, like 100 IRL. Raising it is basically not viable for other characters. Maybe you can invest some points for hacker Hacker. But that’s an unsure trade-off. To access all the doors, to use a BFG, and ещ hack everything you need insane int, basically spending all the points and implants. All to get basically nothing of use.
The streets are filled with ad and vending bots. And that is one of the coolest details in this game. They stalk and pester passerby, no matter what they are currently doing. Even if they are being shot at. You can “talk” with these bots, or you can hack them to gain a scout, a damage soaker, a taunter.
You already have enough int to hack most of the civilian bots. But for combat bots, you already need 75 for suburban bots, a whole 90 for spiders, and 120 for the bots on the third stage. More advanced systems are basically out of your reach.
In the fan game you cannot talk to spam bots, and they rebalanced the requirements.
Sight allows you to see the enemies before they see you. Since it’s a spotter game, give one of the companions a couple of strong implants, and you can see almost the whole map.
Health. Exists. Yes, having more can help you survive a hit. But rarely two. And the enemies upgrade their guns faster than you can upgrade your HP, even if you ignore everything else. How long can you survive when you receive 16-24 BFG shots in the back per enemy turn?
Driving. Driving is a skill, that is virtually mandatory on the second stage. You need at least 80, and you can’t get 80 with anyone, before you lose your mind. Basically, just invite Jerome to the team, and forget about the skill.
It’s very fun to see a turn-based game with real driving. Not just a bonus for overworld travel. In a car you can run over enemies without care. But also the cars don’t move that far, and have their own dwindling HP. If you take a car, it won’t respawn, but if you leave it on another map, it will disappear when you get back.
There’s also public transport. It refuses to run people over, so you don’t need to worry about that. You can ride it as a passenger. And there’s “static” public transport. Map-exits, which appear only on a schedule.
Chapter Four
In which i had hope, then lost it, then persevered, then raged, then despaired, then SMASHED THAT F9 button!
So when i played it the first time, i somehow forced myself to reach the second stage. There, you need to break a gate to progress the most obvious quests. (There are also alternative routes, but i didn’t find them.) The gate can be broken with a truck, or with a lot of explosives. Suffering through the harder maps i reached the gate and couldn’t blow it up. I didn’t pick the driver on the previous stage, so i was stuck. With pathetic XP gains there was no chance to level anyone up to drive a truck. There was no way to go back to the previous stage either. So i was virtually stuck.
And that door even respawns if you leave.
This time i went the maximum quests route, but with roleplay. I was not killing innocent people. That does not fit the protagonist as it turns out. There are mutually exclusive quest branches, but people write guides on how to finish the maximum possible amount of quests. I did all which are not outright sociopathic, like starting a school shooting or killing random people for no reason.
Each stage has several quest lines giving you access to the next stage. More or less. The first stage has the most complex and numerous side-quests. Each next has way less time put into it.
Most of the quests in the game require you to bring a thing, or to kill someone. And with that amount of hitman work at least a half of them are written in a weird way:
— I don’t like people X.
Your only interaction is execution of a non-hostile civilian (or a bandit in the best case).
— I killed X
— Are you nuts? I didn’t mean to kill them literally. Anyway, here’s your reward.
Many kill quests are actually death quests so you can make someone else kill the mark for you, and avoid a reputation hit.
There are many alternative ways to finish a stage, going through the same points. But the game doesn’t auto-complete the available quests, like in proper games. To maximise questing you need to manually accept every quest from every involved person, before doing it, and then report. If you ganked a guy for one quest giver, the other who wanted it will not reward you.
It seems the fan game actually tracks pre-finished quests.
When you start the game you are told to go and ask the local merchant about your cop problem. Entering the first location you are witnessing two neutral factions fighting each other. And there’s a minor presence of police force. The important thing is to not get involved and loot all the bodies.
The default route is to do jobs for the merchant until you are told to go and talk to the mayor. There are other routes all leading to the same place. And the mayor’s house is the first insane map in the game. It is filled with cops, armoured cops, fully armoured cops and crab tanks. Even with a full team you can’t survive that.
The quest log says that you can sneak/run past the cops and kill the mayor inside his house after which you should run away so there will be less cops on the location. With a runner build this can be done in solo, but i never saw anyone actually do this. And then, just as the quest says, other locations will also be flooded with the strongest cops.
The way to do it is to get to the mutants, and emerge from the sewers and run towards the concrete wall. When the team sits down the spider bots struggle to hit them. Now you need to somehow play peekaboo from the block, killing everything that comes closer. Griffin, grenades, whatever it takes. Standing up near the block gives you a line of sight (but not fire), the cops will be shooting. Sitting down breaks the line of sight so the cops will be advancing. That way you can try to regulate the speed of the attackers.
With a runner build the UZI-thing was good at taking out the ponytail cops (the fan game replaced them with boring models), everything else can be dealt with a burst from a gryphon up close. Useless goons can work as healers.
The sewers are the first place that can sell strength implants. Entering/exiting the location refreshes the merchant’s offer. The implants are expensive, so you can save for a couple before it’s time to move to the next stage. But theoretically no one stops you from farming this stage for months, and have your already full team fully implanted (and with a couple of levels) by the time you reach the next stage.
Even with the main character already being a good runner, the tedium didn’t disappear. And i had to repeat that location several times, to maximise the questing. I can’t even imagine how many grenades and reloads you need to beat this without a runner. Oh, wait, i did that. With the few level-ups you get in an entire playthrough, first time i wasted my points on all the garbage.
80 dex and everything else into str, nothing else matters. And the combat will still be infuriating, despite the broken OP builds. Because they are not OP, breaking the game with insane builds is the only normal way to play it. I really hope that the easiest difficulty is not much harder than 3 times harder than dank sauce, because the classic third out of four is arse.
When you enter the second segment your journal suggests making peace with cops. That is, if you have the necessary companion. Though, not recruiting everyone from the first stage is a really dumb idea in this game.
But to talk to the big cop, you need to go through an entire level filled with the strongest cops and crab tanks. With the protagonist already being a strong runner i made it in two turns, without killing anyone.
With cops pacified now the main enemies are spetsnaz. There are fewer of them and they are not that strong. But with bigger guns any stray bullet can kill your goon. At some point of the playthrough, a giant dispatch of spetsnaz with giant tanks comes to the police station.
Even with a runner team, which can go from one end of the map to another in just one turn, to kill an enemy pointblank and then return, this was still really hard. The tank has a ton of HP and it blows up when dying. It can severely hurt you or even a nearby cop making police hostile again. It will blow up any character in one shot and it is very aggressive.
Spetsnaz will gather in a huge crowd and will pepper you with machinegun fire. Most of the bullets miss, but your runners have no armour, and even the strongest armour can take only a couple hits.
There are additional quests, but working with cops is probably the easiest and fastest route. Working for the merchant requires you to visit the police station and then use their elevator. Dealing with the science laboratory asks of you to accumulate 100 000 by grinding.
At the third stage spetsnaz gets an upgrade. Now all the enemies are also runners. Your spotter character, seeing almost the entire map, can’t spot any enemies. You press end turn and then out of nowhere 50 guys come to you and each makes 4 shots with BFG, or burst fire rocket launchers, or even simple MGs. Anyway you are dead.
Your 6 runner doods filled with strength implants can do nothing. Your tanky dudes in good armour explode into gibs. What can you do against four blasts from a BFG? And that’s only one enemy, out of a hundred. People who somehow reached this point with conventional builds can just uninstal. You need a ton of energy shields and heavy explosives.
Ii was very lenient towards the game up to the third stage, trying to explain why it is not worthless. But at the third stage enemy machineguns displace the entire air on the level with bullets. And if you survive radar, it will just drop another portion for you.
After that a new enemy appears, special agents. They wear the worst armour, they have no implants according to lore, but they magically have 90% resist to everything.
Your unique guns from the early game start to starve on ammo. Which also is kinda realistic, that low-tier guns are not popular in the rich part of town and on a space station. But you have no ammo.
Meanwhile i had no problem with the maps considered the worst in this game. I run through the cybercentre killing everyone. I entered the crossroads and just poured full-auto grenade launcher fire. I’ve spent way more time trying to survive the radar and the spaceport. Before moving out to spaceport you would want to get some heavy explosives, besides the unique grenade launcher you get on the first stage.
The fourth stage introduces new AoE 1HKO enemies with perfect overwatch. A-ha-ha-ha good luck. I managed to catch them off guard so i just used all the explosives and launchers i had. There was no way to save those civilians. The merchant sells all the calibres. But at that point you don’t really need them. Just get more launchers and ammo for then and move forward.
The last two maps are pretty easy. If you have enough explosives, with your big strength energy you can flatten the last boss fast and easily.
This was a gruelling, exhausting and draining game. Even with the best possible builds i had to save and reload for every shot, because missing one would mean i haven’t dealt enough damage to survive. And then reloading the enemy’s turn, until at least 51 out of those 52 BFG shots miss. The enemies are absolutely relentless in several places. This is all just dice rolling until you get extremely lucky.
Chapter Five
In which you realize you are the baddies.
Notorious hacker Hacker lives in a typical cyberpunk world with martian riots, sky city and the central computer. Hacker Hacker loves hacking too much, while monologuing unabomber manifestos to himself in an empty room. One day while watching weeaboo garbage in a corner of his mind’s eye he intercepted a weird e-mail and almost instantly got a police squad inside his entranceway. Exiting through the backdoor he stumbles upon a local hobo who advises him to seek information in the china town. The hobo, in general, advises too much for a hobo. He even orders elimination of the local crime bosses. In chinatown hacker Hacker has to work in exchange for information. In time he turns into a cold-blooded killer for hire and a mass murderer (at least of cops). All leads point him to the mayor. The mayor says that that’s way above his pay grade, and the cops were ordered from above, from the middle class city.
After ascending to the upper city hacker Hacker gets involved in even pettier work for hire. With good policing there are no gangs, upper class citizens only ask him to deal with their domestic disputes. It turns out cops also are not okay with the events that are unfolding currently. Crusaders who saved the government a while back were almost entirely put into cryosleep some time ago. And now the cryo chambers go offline by entire clusters. First the government claimed that it happened because of malfunction. Now they blamed everything on the recent hack performed by hacker Hacker.
After ascending to the sky city hacker Hacker is contacted by a spetsnaz agent. She tells him that the current orders come from one of the scientists in the cybercentre. But killing Dr. Mortymer was a dead end. Something, something, the new perfect society. The agent advises to just fly to the one place that hasn’t been corrupted by capitalism…. SPACE! There you can ask the government personally. To get there hacker Hacker needs to kill her boss, which means a free promotion for her.
Strange shenanigans are happening at the government’s space spacion. All the cops have marched into the government’s chamber and they still haven’t returned. A weird illegal perfectly humanoid robot is on a killing spree. Government announced a full evacuation and a shutdown of life support. But at this point hacker Hacker is not interested in the truth anymore. He decided to manifest his unabomber manifesto and to just the world into chaos, because he hates calm, happiness and complacency. On his way to the government he discovers that the central computer has taken over and that it also wants to do something similar. But hacker Hacker dismisses AI’s attempts as not radical enough, too soft, too contained, too menshewik. Hacker Hacker wants a world wide chaos, anarchy, new dark ages. Not to just create a perfect matrix to make everyone happy, with already implemented local imperfections to match human needs. And enslave humanity, of course, just cause.
Hacker Hacker destroys the entire space station, accidentally saving humanity from our glorious AI overlords, somehow manages to escape, and just returns back home. To sit there alone, do nothing, watch weeaboo garbage on the internet, hack everything. While not even being aware that he saved everyone, not anyone else is aware of that because there’s no witnesses, no evidence and no one cares. Let’s hope Dinara will get what she wishes for by exploiting the current opportunity.
But that’s all in my head. The actual storytelling is present only in 3,5 vague cutscenes and as text in hacker Hacker’s diary. He writes down all his tasks with some minor commentary and adds an entry every time he gets to the next stage. There is also a cool news tab aggregating different e-newspapers. Depending on their allegiances they lie about the current events happening because of the player. Every time you kill a bandit, cops’ channel describes how they successfully executed the operation. And there’s an encyclopedia collecting all information about items and organizations,
All the character blurbs are also written by the hacker Hacker. Including his own.
Chapter Six
In which i try to convince myself that there is an artistic and consumer merit in this game. Or that there is nothing good in this game.
One of the strengths of this game is the companions. They don’t have their relationship quests or trust quests. Most of them have no personal quests at all, but the game still manages to present them as colourful characters.
Outside of a couple of lines when they join, the companions are represented only by their blurry madskillz photoshop portraits, sound barks and idle chatter. The publisher hired some of the best professional actors and their work shows. But the actors were expensive, so they could afford only a few. Many characters share the same voices, and while the actors try to modify their delivery, if you know, you really know.
Jerom
Ladies and gentelmanies. A distinguished actor of stage and film, TV host, voice actor, the one who does not need introductions — Boris Repetur.
Delivering one of the most gayface performances in the history of gayface. On top of having a stereotypical parody “gay” voice, the character is also bad. He has terrible stats, despite 100 dex. He is a drama queen, self-obsessed, egomaniac, thinks everyone else is beneath him, constantly talks about boys, and hates women. Obsessive gambler. Back in the 00s we thought this is ok.
Hacker Hacker
Also Boris Repetur takes on the main role. Outside of one cringy line about silicone boobs, this is a very good performance. Even if you instantly recognize the voice actor, and it doesn’t sound that different from Jerom. His metaphors and self-deprecating humour make this character way more likeable, despite the unabobmber-manifesto-story being noticeable in the intro, the ending and when faced against overwhelming odds.
He is pretty smart and still young-ish. He had a profitable job and even an arranged governmental marriage. But that was fake and boring. Wife never cared for the government marriage either. Maybe she still lives in their original home in the rich city. Hacker Hacker got himself a place in the lower city, near his workplace. He was wasting more and more time in reality (VR internet), and hacking anything he can as a recreational activity. Until he just stopped going to work.
Tony
For our localization the entirety of Beavis and Butt-head was dubbed by Sergey Chonishvili alone. (Over the original voices, allowing the original performances to peek through, and to colour the translation). He is way more diverse actor than Repetur, so it is harder to spot him. And that’s why he got more prominent roles to carry by himself. For some reason he voices Tony as Beavis, and it’s more of a dramatic role.
Job
Chonishvili’s take on Job is the best performance in this game. It’s the character that holds up the best 20 years after the 00s. For a very unpleasant type of a person, the voice actor makes him extremely likeable and charismatic. Job doesn’t have any quests, the only reason he joins the team is that he is at the end of his rope.
He wasted the majority of his life in the army, until his body couldn’t even take it. No one wanted to hire a war vet with PTSD for a good position, so he was doing odd jobs. Until he started to drink too much, and got a first strike from the cops for vagrancy. After the second strike citizens get their personality over-written. Old-timer Job considers his personality as the last thing that is his. So he just burned his house down and went wandering the streets, looking for trouble. He instantly joins hacker Hacker, either to go to valhalla fighting, or to murder-sucide by cops. He still isn’t sure if he wants to live.
Laika
I used to love Laika back in the 00s. I thought she is one of the best characters ever. She doesn’t hold up at all. She is a kooky MPDG cringely combined with a bimbo. One of her idle lines is a giant rant that she doesn’t talk too much. Oh wow, such comedy, very humour, wow.
She is mostly a pretty good person, well until she meets the protagonist and turns into a mass murderer, or into a very effective mass murderer, with a proper build. But her bio is way better than the lines written for her.
Katrin
The ex-cop is pretty boring as a character. She is a reserved ex-cop and doesn’t talk much. Anything you can know about her is in her bio. She was chosen to lead the prequel game about her career in HTPD. And it makes a lot of sense.
Her bio is a typical tale about police brutality and how she got PTSD. She was just wandering the streets of the lower city until she got caught by the gangsters.
Voiced by Yelena Solov’ova (nm4907262 at this point).
Dinara
And so is mutant Dinara. The delivery is mostly the same, but Dinara has SFX filtre added. She is misanthropic (if she even considers herself a human anymore), and maybe megalomaniac. Outside of that her voice lines are not that prominent either.
Her bio contains some interesting details. The mutants are not just the martian miners who started the rebellion. Any forces which were sent to squash the rebellion got irradiated and mutated all the same. And the government doesn’t like mutants. There wasn’t much choice where to go, but the humanitarian mayor of the lower city offered the mutants to take over the sewers in exchange for working for him. Compared to the alternatives, the sewer wasn’t that bad.
There was no place for her with the mutants anymore, so joining the hacker Hacker was a wway out.
Fat Big Bob
Voiced by Aleksey Kolgan, the russian voice of Shrek and Shrek Nukem. A typical image of a biker with no personality. His bio sheds more light on the penitentiary system of this world. His rare genetic make-up makes him immune to personality-erasure. Because of that people like him have to go to an actual old-school prison, and as prisons go, the only remaining one is really old-school. The warden wants a promotion so he performs uneducated experiments on people in his “care”, hoping to find something that can combat this genetic make-up.
You have a stupid party limit of 6 and if there ever was a game where you need to have all 13 available characters at the same time, it’s here. With 13 game-breaking runner characters you would have whole 5% chance to win, instead of 0.0~ out of 146%
You can’t dismiss your companions to headquarters or to their original place of choice. You can only kick them out. And well, you can’t visit previous stages anyway.
I only replaced Jerom with Bob, and my party was set, and already levelled and filled with implants. So i didn’t use anyone else. Maybe i’ll write about them next time.
It feels like in some sense the new companions exist as replacement for dead ones you already lost. If you grind for ages you can fill your entire party with proper implants on the first stage. On the second stage you really need to fill all available implant slots. The third stage is another difficulty cliff climb, so you should be in the best form. And the second stage has the store with the cheapest implants in the game. The third stage offers whole three new characters when your team is already set. Like, now you are supposed to farm money to get an entire new set (or three) of implants, now at 4x the cost? And then you get another character on the final small stage.
NPCs are voiced by the same actors. And the lower city is filled with bad fake parody accents of asian and middle-eastern stereotypes. Many NPCs have their own idle lines which make this world alive. But also not all of them are good, and they trigger too often, so you will hear them a lot. There are background sounds of events which are happening somewhere off-screen. Shoot-outs, sirens, explosions, the background noises of a city. The music is pretty good too.
Modern cyberpunk is sanitised to death, so much so that it’s not cyber and not punk. While this game doesn’t have a somewhat deeper theme like Binary Domain and Armitage 3, you are still playing an interactive unabomber manifesto, with a true cyberpunk look, feel and texture. The class separation is literal, and in its lore the world is as punk and dirty as it can be. The virtual reality internet is called just “reality” entirely replacing the real world for many. Human reproduction is arranged by the government. The people have their personalities neatly erased instead of going into prisons. The government doesn’t even occupy the same planet as the people they govern. And even at that they were over-reliant on a central computer to make decisions they are paid to make, and they allowed it to take over.
This is a cool world, with mostly cool characters, and it is cool cyberpunk. The atmosphere of this game can probably be called great. Even the interfaces are stylish.
Chapter Seven
In which there are crashes and low FPS.
This is a patched remastered version from ~2015. It was made to run on modern systems. And it does run more or less. If you play in fullscreen you can’t alt-tab, even your in-line controls in earphones will not work. You can only [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del], which will usually also kill the game. But you can make it run windowed in the options. It will launch in a tiny window, which you can maximize. But any time the game switches to a cutscene, it will show it in original size, and when it will maximize back the position will move and the game’s window will be off-screen.
Even these ancient graphics are often run at low FPS on my 10900k 3080Ti 32RAM PCI-E NVME gen 4.
The game still crashes from time to time. Especially when you ride it hard with quickloads. Which is very often.
Chapter Eight
In which i have to decide if it was worth it, and how much.
The fan remaster fixes and improves a lot of things, but all the fan voice acting is really bad. It’s not a real replacement for this game. Just an alternative with arguably worse presentation. So the official 1.8.0 remaster is the best option for the original experience today. And in this case i mean original art-piece, not original insane gameplay. The third stage and one location in the last stage made me mad. But overall, this probably was worth it. And the more textual content you consume in it the better it gets. If the easy difficulty is actually really easy, and if you know russian to hear the original actors and to read the original journal entries — this is probably worth a try.
But purely from the gameplay PoV — this prepare to die edition exists only for people who love to challenge themselves with unfair RNG and overcome the odds.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 