ANNO: Mutationem

> Beauty is only skin deep ## Why - Stunning 2.5D with plenty of care put into (most) environments - Combat is pretty fun, if not particularly challenging - Packed with personality/pop culture references ## Why Not - Story is laughably incoherent - Lots of dialogue, lots of it awkward (in English) ## Impressions "Frustration". If I had to choose one word to describe ANNO: Mutationem, that'd be the one. ANNO gracefully delivers a stunningly rendered cyberpunk world packed with cool character designs and fluid combat, then falls flat on its face the second it opens its mouth. I'll start with the positives, including some surprises I didn't expect from this style of game. The main draw is definitely the presentation, pixel art characters over a 3D, neon-drenched backdrop works so well for a Cyberpunk setting. The amount of effort put into this aspect of the game is ridiculous; backdrops are detailed and the number of distinct, cool looking filler NPCs is mildly ridiculous. There're also a few cameos; I was delighted when the bartending minigame lead to me meeting a certain other cyberpunk bartender and her boss. There's a lot of pop-culture influence here as well, the main antagonists being a mix of the SCP Foundation and SEELE from Evangelion (mostly in terms of iconography) is freshest in my mind, but there're referential posters, dialogue and characters scattered throughout. To avoid the confusion of controlling a 2D sprite in 3D space, during exploration you can move in the Z-axis but can't jump, while in combat you're limited to the movement of a side-scroller. The combat is another strong point; as full of systems as the world is full of unique NPCs but somehow pulling it off. You can parry, block, use heavy/light/melee attack combos, shoot enemies with 3 different gun types, juggle them in the air, break their stance then use a finisher move, transform into an unkillable monster, deflect projectiles like a jedi and use your iframe dash to break enemies ankles. If I had a complaint it's that 90% of the enemies in the game require absolutely none of this, you can just mash attack at them & occasionally dodge to win encounters with no damage taken. This has the knock-on effect of making the (often pretty creative) bosses feel much harder than they are, as they sometimes require you to actually use some of these mechanics or do something creative like bait projectiles from one enemy in a group fight into hitting the others. I was also pleasantly surprised by the level design at times; sure there're a lot of blank corridors with enemies to fight but there's also a surprising number of Dark Souls style shortcuts to unlock which'll allow you to loop back to a 'bonfire'. The side quests I tried may have just been 'go talk to person X' or fetch thing 'Y', but some of them at least had memorable endings (like unmasking the identity of a popular idol). Exploration is definitely rewarded as well, there's endless junk to pick up and a lot of it provides even more pop culture references if you read the item descriptions. This deluge of loot kinda leads into one of my criticisms of the game though; there's just way too much stuff. While there's certainly a lot of loot, none of it feels meaningful. There's so much that you'll end up just hitting 'take all' every time you open a container without even looking, because there's too much different stuff to keep track of. It doesn't help that junk is literally junk other than their fun item descriptions, selling for nothing, and components require another opaque disassembly step to become anything you can craft weapons with. You need a whole bunch of components to craft anything, and when you pick stuff up there's no way of knowing if it's what you need or not because there's no relationship between what you pick up and what you see on the crafting screen. It would've been much better to tone the _amount_ of loot down and instead make the stuff you find actually meaningful, something a lot of other games already figured out. The same issue of quantity over quality applies to the dialogue, but isn't its biggest issue. At the beginning of the game I stopped to listen in on every conversation & talk to everyone; there were enough hints of personality and humour that I thought it'd probably be worth it. Unfortunately by mid-game I was ignoring NPCs and mashing 'A' through every required conversation, and by late game I skipped a lot of cutscenes altogether. I'm gonna assume it's partly a localization issue because those hints of personality and humour do make occasional appearances; maybe in the original Chinese it's way better. But I suspect the sheer quantity of NPC dialogue, conversations you can overhear, cutscenes and story dialogue just mean they couldn't come up with enough interesting/coherent things for characters to say. Speaking of coherence; the story does not have it. You start off pretty well; mysterious illness, hacker sidekick, missing brother in trouble with a gang. But the writers made the unique choice of leaving you more and more bewildered as the story progresses, right up until the end. Characters make absolutely nonsensical choices, overreact to tiny things or don't react at all to major reveals and the cutscenes meant to reveal what's happening behind the scenes are just used for cringy aura farming. I'll give you a few of the more egregious examples of stuff that makes no sense: - You break into the container-ship base of a major gang leader, free a prisoner, murder your way through his entire gang, kill his giant robot boss... and then are warped to his office where you have a pretty relaxed conversation with him, during which he tries to _threaten you_. The person who just waltzed into his base and soloed every defense he had to offer. - The false ending is pretty easy to get, but that's not really the issue. The issue is once you get it you simply appear in front of Deus ex Machina lady, who calmly informs you she saved you off screen and to please proceed through the corridor to the right so you can get the real ending. They don't even try to provide an in-universe explanation for this, or tell you why you should've known to beat this one random guy beforehand. I don't even remember seeing him before mask lady pointed at him and said 'go gettem' Last and definitely least, the final choice. A member of the organisation who has kidnapped your brother and your best friend, spent the whole game trying to alternately murder, manipulate and control you and is just generally presented as being ultra-shady offers you a totally trustworthy bracelet to suppress your powers, telling you they won't let you leave. Mind you, this is immediately after you dispatched an interdimensional monster they had no hope against, so threatening you is once again hilarious. If you make the only rational choice, resisting and escaping with your brother, he decides to charge ahead of his godlike sister and get shot (which she somehow doesn't stop), leading to you going crazy and the world ending. To get the good ending, where everything is sunshine and rainbows, you need to take the control bracelet and trust that the MAIN ANTAGONISTS OF THE GAME will do as they promise and 'hopefully' let you go live a normal life. I really wanted to like ANNO: Mutationem, and the combat/visuals did get me through to the end, but man the story made it a slog. My suspension of disbelief had only just recovered from the final season of Stranger Things, and now it's absolutely in tatters. Despite that I actually recommend this game, which might be difficult to believe after the last few paragraphs. Just don't go into it expecting a story, skip all the dialogue you can if you care about story and enjoy the creative combat/beautiful scenery that makes this game worthwhile. Probably wait for a sale though, the full price for a game with no story is a bit much.

美术相当好，这游戏唯一的优点了 赛博朋克与scp题材 游玩体验：马拉松，通马桶，马拉松，然后播片（剧情很无聊） 战斗手感更是不知所谓 打折推荐购买，美术值，不打折不推荐 谁不想急头白脸通个马桶再接两个神秘支线任务，看到门不可以从这一侧打开，最后美美的马拉松这么一段

还可以,就是这个服装有点多余了,一到战斗就变了,每次都要跑365里路去换,不能改一改吗?删了衣服系统都可以,不然別一战斗或坐车就变衣服

TL;DR: this game is incredibly underwhelming, and I don't think it's worth playing. Clearly I don't think the same as a lot of people. I personally did not enjoy this game, and I made sure to finish it before writing this review so that no one could say "it gets good after X point." I'll try and summarize it with numbers first before I go into a few details: Gameplay and mechanics: 2/5 Visuals: 2/5 Story, characters, and dialogue: 2/5 Soundtrack: 4/5 Voice acting: 1/5 While the moment-to-moment gameplay works reliably, that's about all that can be said for it. It doesn't tread any new ground, and feels like it's just doing what so many other games have done far better. It also repeats the sin of other games where you're given a bunch of options regarding things like character build, but half of what you're given is criminally situational, be it because enemies hit you when you're trying to charge or because they're immune to your special attacks' effects. The pixel art looks messy, largely due to how much the POV camera moves around and only serves to showcase how the characters are both flat pixel frames, and how badly the pixels scale as they get closer and further from the POV. The story feels both cliche and up its own ass, and that's not counting how absolutely inane and unsatisfying the ending is. The soundtrack is both atmospheric and very well-made. It was one of only two parts of this game I liked, the other being the part in the story where you find people living in the sewers (that story beat was lovely, to give credit where it's due). And then there's the voice acting. Ayane's voice is both nasally and grating, half the villains sound like they're speaking through a filter made of rocks, and a bunch of the subtitles don't match the audio. I once heard "if you're not going to do anything new, be sure to do everything right." This game couldn't even do that.

The 30 minutes I played felt like torture, It's one anime cliche after another. The dialogue is so full of it, it felt like they used a lot of words to say absolutely nothing. I have never been repulsed this much in such a short time.

25年前来考古。作为最早一批在纪元变异1群潜伏的D级人员，我买过游戏，但进入游戏游戏内出了门，感觉不对劲，非常不对劲，退款退群。至今深思，还是来说一下，就是吃屎感，剧情对象不是给男性玩家准备的，并且十分傲慢。

[h1][b]「仏作って魂入れず。―ネオンの輝きに『魂』を置き忘れた、ハリボテのサイバーパンク」[/b][/h1] [h1]ストーリー[/h1] 舞台は高度に発達したサイバーパンク都市。 高度な戦闘技術を持つ主人公のアン・フローレスが、行方不明になった弟を探すために、相棒のハイパーなハッカー、アヤネと共に裏社会の陰謀へと足を踏み入れる……。 [h1]概要[/h1] 2Dのドット絵キャラクターと3Dの背景を融合させた「2.5D」のビジュアルが特徴のアクションアドベンチャー。 サイバーパンクな街を探索するRPGパートと、横スクロールで展開するハイスピードな戦闘パートで構成されている。武器のカスタマイズやチップの換装といった、一通りの「サイバーパンクゲームらしい」要素は網羅されている。 [h1]感想[/h1] [b]「いくら表面をなぞっても、名作たちの『血』は流れていない。」[/b] 本作を一言で表すなら「仏作って魂入れず」まさに、安易な中華版ゲームの限界を煮詰めたような作品だ。 確かにドット絵と3Dを組み合わせたビジュアルは美しく、パッと見の雰囲気だけは一流に見える。しかし、その中身は驚くほど空虚だ。 作り手は勘違いしているのではないか。サイバーパンクとは、単にネオンサインと美少女と義体を出せば完成するものではない。 [b]『サイバーパンク2077』が描いた、システムに抗う個人の圧倒的な熱量。 『デトロイト ビカム ヒューマン』が突きつけた、アンドロイドを通して問う人間性の定義。 『攻殻機動隊 GHOST IN THE SHELL』が追求した、ネットの海に溶けゆくアイデンティティの深淵。[/b] 本作には、それら名作たちが血を吐く思いで築き上げた「魂」が欠片も存在しない。 かっこいいポーズを決め、それっぽい用語を並べ立てても、その根底にあるべき思想や、プレイヤーの価値観を揺さぶるような鋭さがないのだ。ただ「サイバーパンクっぽいもの」を継ぎ接ぎしただけのハリボテであり、物語の掘り下げは浅く、キャラクターの動機も薄っぺらい。 いくら表面を精巧にパクれても、その作品がなぜ名作と呼ばれているのかという「本質」を理解しないままでは、いつまで経っても「ガワだけ立派な安物」の域を出ることはできないのだ。 [h1]評価[/h1] 【GOOD】 ・2Dと3Dを組み合わせたグラフィックの質感と、キャラクターのデザインは純粋に優れている。 ・戦闘アクションのレスポンス自体は悪くなく、動かしていて一定の爽快感はある。 【BAD】 ・[b]致命的なまでの「魂」の欠如。[/b] ストーリー、世界観、哲学、そのすべてが過去の名作の劣化コピーでしかない。 ・[b]支離滅裂なシナリオ構成。[/b] サイバーパンクに無理やり超常現象（SCP要素）を混ぜた結果、物語の焦点がボケてしまい、最後まで感情移入できない。 ・[b]内面のないキャラクター。[/b] 主人公を含め、記号的な「萌え」や「クール」の枠組みから一歩も出ておらず、心に響く対話が皆無。

I pushed myself through the main story and I am certain I hate everything about the game. This is the first hack and slash combat style game where I would like to avoid both hacking and slashing for as long as possible. The gameplay is shallow, stale and boring, artstyle choices are lazy and plainly weird looking, the character designs look ok-ish until the game decides to zoom in on 'em during the cutscentes, and there are lots of cutscenes. My favorite ones are the dialogue cutscenes where there's zero movement and the dev leaves a pause of silence after every character's line, and there's no way to skip to the next one, you just need those 3-5 seconds of complete silence to let the line sink. The soundrack is dull and bland. I've played for 7hrs and I can't think of a single melody from the game. I assure you, there is music, but it's such a generic cyberpunk-ish synthwave bullsh*t that you won't ever remember it. The game tries really hard to immitate that 2017 The Last Nigh trailer's vibe and aesthetic, but neither pixelart, nor 3D designs are able to replicate it well. Also the world setting is all over the place, blending cyberpunk with magic, parallel worlds and SCP fanfiction makes no sense. Overall waste of time and storage space.