Beyond a Steel Sky

First of all this is a sequel to the game called Beneath a Steel Sky from 1994 which you can grab it for free right here on Steam. Also from my little googling around there was a remaster of it in 2009, but apparently that was only for iPod and iPhones. Hopefully the devs will give it some love and make a proper PC remake/remaster like they did with Broken Sword. Now, because I didn’t played that one I can’t really compare it, one thing is for sure, this one jumped to 3D, made in Unreal and it ain’t that great: sometimes characters do not move their mouths when talking, NPCs bump into each other or enter your frame during a dialogue, or the camera is off during a dialogue cutscene, it has a proximity hacking system which sometimes you gotta wait for a droid to be in a certain range, some stiff or rough animations, the beginning (which is more opened) has invisible barriers, NPCs you can talk/interact move around way too much and you gotta catch them when they stop. Another thing is the story, in this game you pick up after 10 years has passed from the first one. This means you will meet up with things from the past, this also means if you do plan on playing the original, then this one will feature heavy spoils. But I do like that it offers you plenty of knowledge about the past, enough for you to get a broad understanding of what happened. I am not gonna go deeper in the story to avoid spoilers, but I will say that you will be doing some detective work to uncover the dark secrets of a technological advanced utopia where everyone needs to be happy. But I will mention the gameplay. It is a standard point&click in 3D. Personally I am not a fan of the graphics, the animations don’t help either. As for additional mechanics, you got a hacking one which involves scanning specific terminals/devices, you can then hack them by changing around certain commands, think of it like very basic coding, like: if character is near perform X action otherwise do Y. Well, the most you do is change Y and X, other times you cannot do anything, I am not even sure why it allows you to hack those devices. As for the puzzles, I didn’t found them too hard or convoluted, and if you do, there is a Hit system which can offer a lot of info if you are stuck. There are also a few death scenes (no blood or gore visible, even when you get shot the camera pans away without showing gruesome stuff), but these are made useless because the game just resets to the moment before you die, you don’t even need to worry about saving, there are no repercussions whatsoever. And speaking of puzzles, the last ones were just way too easy, I would’ve expected the final phase to put up more of a fight. So, it may not be as great as Broken Sword, but it was an enjoyable point&click I did liked the hacking mechanic despite the fact that sometimes I had to fiddle around to get 2 or more devices in range (cuz you can hack multiple at once and mess around commands between them). In the end it is a nice point and clicker if you like those, but I really don’t think it’s worth the full price of 30 bucks.