The Technomancer Reviews
Your enjoyment of The Technomancer is going to depend on whether you're willing to overlook the things it doesn't do so well. The story is fascinating, but you have to deal with characters that are dull and not worth remembering. The combat system is rather deep, but you'll have to be much more proficient due to the lack of intelligence displayed by your AI companions. Finally, overall dull look and bad audio choices detract from the elements that genuinely look good, such as the skin on each character. Like Spiders Studio's previous works, The Technomancer will find an audience among those who don't mind sampling from the ambitious French house, but others may want to play other available action RPGs before trying this title..
'The Technomancer' is not without its merits, but can’t quite find a place for itself in the RPG/action field. It is clear what Spiders was trying to do and I don’t fault them for it - their creation has the potential to be something special. In this current form that’s all it is though, just potential.
The team writes intelligent, worthy scenarios and narratives, and then they do the best they can to build gameplay to support that concept. Spiders never quite gets there with executing to vision, but I don’t mean this as a backhanded complement; I genuinely appreciate what this team does, because it’s unique and interesting and I wish more developers had the gumption to try something like The Technomancer.
A true jack of all trades, The Tehnomancer's impressive visuals don't make up for its lack of engaging combat and inability to set itself apart from other games in the genre. It's a mashup of many other open-world RPGs that is produced by a smaller developer than any of them; it sets itself up for disappointment.
All in all The Technomancer is a fun little adventure which will definitely grow on you. It’s from the school of RPGs which are engrossing despite their laundry list of flaws. There’s much to be said for a small team like Spiders chipping away at a hideously involving and expensive genre, and for that they should be congratulated. It doesn’t have the polish of a Mass Effect 3 or Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but The Technomancer sure has a lot of heart.
Good for a fight, dull for everything else
The Technomancer’s not even actively terrible. It’s just completely forgettable. Come for the Brutalist architecture, stay because you’ve got nothing better to do with seventeen hours of your life. And that’s a low bar, here.
Not good but not awful, The Technomancer serves more as a showcase for the future potential of Spiders than a game worth playing on its own merit.
Just what the world needed, a sequel to Mars: War Logs!
If you’re not a gigantic fan of the genre, I can’t really recommend The Technomancer.
The Technomancer has some interesting hooks but falls by the wayside. With more time, polish and a lot more heart, it could have been something more but this vacation to Mars is imminently uneventful and forgettable.
The Technomancer is an ambitious sci-fi RPG limited by the realities of budgets. Fun and intriguing, but lacking polish and certain genre staples.
Decisively average, The Technomancer can be an amusing role-playing experience thanks to its combat system, provided you are ready for constant repetition baked in a sub-par shell.
I highly recommend playing this game with a controller of some kind, especially if you are playing on the PC like I did, as it makes the game feel more fluid as the combat system is generally just a serious of non-sensical button mashing, think Tekken but with customisable boots.
Derivative setting, dull NPCs, and clunky combat make The Technomancer an exemplar of lost potential
And every now and then, the feeling of playing a classic BioWare RPG from a decade or so rises to the surface.
It’s hard to surmise whether The Technomancer and its faults come by way of financial or otherwise creative pitfalls, because there are some interesting and rather enjoyable moments to take out of both the game’s easy-to-access combat system and the rather nostalgic return of a colonized Mars seen through the eyes of an 80’s motion picture.
While The Technomancer is not the first and won’t be the last title to have a different price tag based on platform (PC vs. consoles). At a cheaper price point on Steam (and just about everywhere else that sells digital PC games), the game’s jank can almost be forgiven at the lower price point, especially when coming from a small independent studio. Sure, there are parts of the game that I do not enjoy, but when you compare this to many AAA and full-priced games that have come out recently, The Technomancer includes much more bang for your buck. On console, however, that is another story altogether. As a full-price $59.99 game, I find it a bit harder to recommend the game on consoles until it can be purchased for a discounted price.
Honestly, I’m disappointed that The Technomancer couldn’t deliver. I want to like it so much! The seeds of an excellent game are there, but they just haven’t been tended to a level that really needs to be played. Hopefully Spiders will patch the game to improve some of the difficulty wall issues and this will become a more enjoyable experience, but I don’t think it’s a must-play for now. Overall it feels like an atmospheric step forward for the developer, but a mechanical trip backwards. Until that gets sorted, the red planet can wait.
It�s far from great, but sometimes just being good really is good enough.