An ex-military cybernetic supersoldier fights across a corporate mega-city of ash and smog, guided by a rogue AI toward the tower of the ruling Junto, seeking penance for a past as a suppression tool. The cyberpunk-doom tone lands hard, with codex worldbuilding dropped between arenas filling in the mega-city’s rot. The grim, nihilistic climax, in which the handler reveals the bargain’s true price, gives the whole campaign a bitter aftertaste that matches the ash-choked streets it plays out in.
Movement is the heart of everything: wall-running, sliding, chained jumps and a shotgun-look-down boost fuse traversal with combat, Doom aggression with Mirror’s Edge traversal, and bullet-time weak-point headshots with overkill jetpack-grunt executions. Kills restore health, ammo and adrenaline, creating a relentless aggro rhythm that never lets the pace drop. It amplifies the entire experience, and even when it punishes, the fun never stops; Club Sakra’s warehouse arenas are the early high point.
The soundtrack is dynamic, amping up with combat intensity, and stands among the year’s best game audio; the retro pixel art built with modern techniques looks jaw-dropping from a distance, a look that reads modern from afar and lovingly chunky up close. The simple art style pairs with stable, high framerates that keep the whole thing silky, and the gunplay feels superb: punchy pistols, a satisfying shotgun, dismemberment as overkill punctuation. Seven episodes span Walled City rooftops, warehouse arenas, canal streets, the Badlands weapons arena, the Gore Complex’s generator sabotage and the vertical Spire finale.
The weapon roster grows steadily from pistol and SMG through shotgun, minigun, grenade launcher and RPG, to a research-lab rail gun that plays like a turret in gun form. Melee finishers on stunned enemies close the loop. Roughly five hours cover the full campaign, and scalable damage multipliers offer a genuine difficulty dial, one that could have rescued the finale outright. Open Air Sickness’s street arenas deserve a specific nod for pacing, the best stretch of pure combat in the package.
The Sentry Bots sour large stretches of the back half: hard-hitting, tanky drones whose design is not the problem but whose damage values hit far too hard for no real reason. Weak guidance through traversal-only stretches means getting lost repeatedly in the Badlands and the Spire, though the refusal to hold any hand is itself part of the appeal. Chapter 2’s water boss turns a potentially great fight into a resented one, with unavoidable chip damage from rising and falling toxic water.
The final boss converts the game into a bullet hell, with spongy turrets, no pickups and a one-health-kit economy that makes the whole thing feel unhinged rather than hard; halving turret health would fix it. The SMG ammo economy punishes spray-and-pray play, and the Spire’s tight jumps turn finicky at speed, demanding wall-facing jump spam in place of precision. The codex entries fill in the mega-city’s lore admirably, but the world’s grim, nihilistic tone is the real reward for reading them. Both friction notes are small against a campaign this confident.
Overall, an incredibly stylish, superbly smooth movement-first shooter whose wall-run combat, dynamic soundtrack and retro-modern aesthetic make it easy to love, with two resented boss fights, spongy finale turrets and some finicky late navigation as the real costs. All of it is fixable with a difficulty dial, and none of it dulls a five-hour campaign this confident in its own identity.
