Tokyo 42 Reviews
Tokyo 42 has been sold on the strong, vivid visual design of its world, but how player's view it is at the root of the game's biggest faults when it comes to play. The isometric angles and transitions between them often hinder smooth movement and a player's understanding of where they are in the world.When the game comes together as intended, it serves up inventive missions with the thrills to match its obvious influences, but those moments are broken up too frequently by frustrating design choices.
Tokyo 42 is an engaging isometric game that is hurt tremendously by a mechanic that should have been a selling point. While the game plays fine, the need to constantly manage the camera ruins any sense of intensity that comes with a lot of the missions. Instead, it makes the player feel hopeless, as enemies barrel down on one side of them, and an unseeable escape remains hidden behind the gorgeous environment.
While I was originally extremely excited for Tokyo 42's stylistic cyberpunk world, I found myself dreading it after an hour or two. The city may look great, but it gets in the way of the game itself. Combine this with a poor aiming system, crazy difficulty spikes, and an uninteresting multiplayer, and you're left with a game that rarely manages to be enjoyable.
There is a lot that goes wrong with Tokyo 42. This was a concept that had so much promise but is held back by terrible design choices and technical issues.
Beautiful, strange and sometimes a bit fiddly, Tokyo 42 offers a dazzling toybox to explore.
Visually stunning but wholly underwhelming, Tokyo 42 fails to capitalise on its inventive premise.
Tokyo 42 is an inventive and strikingly attractive game, with a very natural blend of stealth, combat and figuring out a path, unfortunately hamstrung somewhat by absolute fealty to its isometric perspective. ... An impressive accomplishment, but sometimes a grating one too.
Tokyo 42 takes some of the best features from the original Grand Theft Auto and packages them up in a sublimely gorgeous aesthetic, resulting in one of the most visually pleasing indie games to release this year.