Well, I went through three more games none of you will ever play, so listen up.
NeonCode
Just as the game itself says, it is a short, one hour long noir story in cyberpunk aethetics. From dev's itch.io page:
The development started at November 2017, and finished at Aug 2018. I mostly worked on the game after work, so the full development time is about 250-280 hours.
So you have what you have. A small side-project. Somewhere else the dev also admitted that he never quite finished it, because it became way too hard for one man to handle. I completely understand him, only real titans can make a full 3D game on their own. Anyway, what that means is that the ending of the story is somewhat abrupt, but also somehow fitting.
What I definitely gotta say, is that I like this game's cyberpunk more than Cyberpunk 2077's cyberpunk: NeonCode has hovervehicles side by side with old muscle cars, airships in the sky, all the good jazz.
Also, the dev was kind enough to upload the soundtrack online for free, and it has several cool tracks.
Neon Wings: Air Race
From the same dev, but it is actually a finished game. It's definitely not WipeOut or any other serious racer, but it is solid... and catchy. Like, I cannot say that I totally enjoyed it, but it lasted only for two-three evenings, and I found myself really wanting to come back to it and finish it. So it delivered... something.
I contacted the dev at this point and he admitted that they've overdid it with controls, but, well... You can get used to those. Yeah, they are not tip-top, but it works.
And the game is fucking free, to top it all off. This piece of code is definitely worth its price.
Glitchpunk
Oh, boy, what an apt name...
There was a wonderful post on another forum that I want to quote in full here:
There is nothing new under the sun. One of the biggest takeaways of my recent deep dive into console emulation is that most of these indie games have a console/early pc progenitor with more content, better graphics and music, less bugs, and better performance on low end machines. It's incredibly frustrating to see a low graphics text adventure on itch that I'm interested in, but because it was developed in unity there is an insane load time or general meltdown over playing an animation, displaying a textbox and a picture, things PCs handled no problem in the past. I can boot up a similar adventure game from 1990 on emulator and it runs great. Programming being more difficult in the old days was actually a great gatekeeper in game development IMO.
Glitchpunk is the epitome of that post.
It's a game that tries to emulate first few GTAs, and it is full of glitches and bad perfomance. Can you imagine that? A game that is mostly sprites fails to perform on a modern machine. And it weights about 10 GBs.
I mean, here's just from the top of my head:
Every city loads for minutes (excpet for the last city, which is miniscule in size and only has three missions). The third city is just... out there. I mean, the loading time is 10 freaking minutes. Can you believe that? A ten minute long loading screen. A great incentive to play good though. You definitely do not want to die and wait for another 10 minutes while reloading the city.
Every city, except for the last one (which is, once again, miniscule), suffers from framedrops. Framedropping! In a sprite-based game!
In second city the game several times spawned all the traffic under the map.
In one mission, the target marker disappeared for whatever reason. Luckily, it was close to the end, and I just remembered where it was.
DLC car only really worked properly in the second city. I had to spawn it manually with a command line in any other.
There's a mission where you destroy a radio station. The station gets replaced with an asset line, meaning there was supposed to be some asset there, and the line is eithr incorrect, or the asset never was added.
And these are just from the top of my head! There are dozens of bugs in this game. And aside from bugs...
The story in the third city is, uh... very abstract, to put it softly. Senile, to put it hard. It looks like the third city was never finished properly? Which is a shame, since it is the slavic city and the aesthetics are spot on.
To get all the endings, you have to complete every city three times. Re-completing the first three introductory missions is extra annoying (fourth city is, once again, spared, since it only has three missions to begin with).
Car designer is no Ray Larabie.
So on, so on.
All that being said, I completed that game from start to finish. Why? Well, because it has its charm. The cyberpunk stuff is all here, with neon lights and androids. The story is actually good enough, aside from the aforementioned third city. Out of three gangs in the first and second city, there were some really interesting characters, whom I really wanted to stick with. Some art was cool here and there. And the loading screens, which actually have camera not top-down, but angled, make me think that the game would've been much better if it was isometric rather than top-down.
And the fourth-wall breaking ending in the fourth city is actually quite cool. Even if rather bold. In fact, all endings in the last city are cool. It looks like the devs decided to give up on the size of the city and missions and focus on the writing instead, and it was the best call they could've make. Becuase the last city works perfectly, loads in under a minute, doesn't drop frames, and it delivers the coolest stuff the game has to offer in the shortest time possible. Compare it with the third city, which is the biggest city in the game, but it loads for 10 minutes, has less missions than any other city (leaving you with bugger all to do on a huge-ass map), and has writing that is pure non-sense and barely connect with anything else that goes on in the game.
To sum it up, Glitchpunk definitely had some soul and a ton of ambition in it, and I actually respect that. Out if these three neon-filled games, Glitchpunk takes the weird place of being the worst of three and the best of three at the same time. It barely works, but if you have the patience to get past the rather unwelcoming facade, Glitchpunk has much more to offer than any of these three games.
The dev is now working on a new game, and Lord knows I will gladly check it out once it will be done.
And yeah, I actually decided to try Glitchpunk, because its artwork features a Mustang. Spoiler: there's no Mustang in a game. There are some retro-looking cars though.
I extracted sprites of the two characters that I liked, so have'em.
