The latest recruit into an elite sect of Technomancers, the spearhead of Abundance’s army (a futuristic city on the corporation run planet Mars), is a kid from the slums named Zachariah Mancer. After completing his training the newly initiated Zachariah is given to the army as a lieutenant and presented with two subordinates. After a few missions things go awry and Zach gets caught up in the ongoing conflict between the secret police of the Abundance corporation and the Mars military.
The Technomancer is light on RPG elements and heavy on the combat side. Abilities improve through a skill tree, but the effects are meager. No matter how many points you put into a skill it never feels as though that ability has gotten any better. And despite the combat making up such a large part of the game it is actually one of the Technomancer's weakest elements. Characters fight in three styles: Guardian (mace and shield), Warrior (quarterstaff), or Rogue (dagger and pistol). Technomancers are a specialized type of mutant that can augment their weapons with electricity or cast area attacks. Movement is sluggish, clunky, and the controls are loose. There is no flow to the combat or room for skill to factor in. Like with the developer's previous titles, enemies are arbitrarily difficult. They soak up damage and hit hard in order to give the game a fake dark-souls difficulty curve. The combat system is just not as refined as it needs to be for the type of challenging gameplay the developers tried to pull off.
The best I can say about the game is that the martian landscapes were rather impressive, visually. Everything else is sorely in need of substance, balancing, and polish. The main plotline lacks tension or punch and the side quests are just as insubstantial. There is a lack of meaningful role-playing elements in a game where the protagonist is too much of a blank-slate to be likable. The Technomancer tries to be grander than it is, and for a small team it is an impressive endeavor, even if it doesn't quite achieve what it was aiming for.
As is typical for this developer, most of what you see in the trailer is not in the game.
First posted to videogamegeek.com
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