Cloudpunk

Game development is a total team effort. Everyone pulls in the same direction.. and it's clear Cloudpunk suffers from unrealized ambition. The game shines aesthetically; driving is smooth and easy to handle (maybe too simple) the city has great character and the ambiance is fantastic. The writing is.. bad, the voice acting is wooden. There were several times I had to pause and walk away from the game because some line of dialogue was delivered so poorly it felt like all lines were recorded in a discord call. There is this "AI" dog character throughout the game with perhaps the worst delivery of the bunch. Even the protagonist sounds dead and uninspired. This is PARTICULARLY BAD because the game contains tons of unskippable dialogue, much of which will continue to play while you sit around and wait at a nav point objective (sometimes for several minutes). And there are tons of voice actors here of varying talent. The ones who shine really show up the bums off the street (I'm looking at you Pashta PASTA, no talent random black woman talking through her nose with AAV inflections.) A lot of race specific character photos have voice acting that is distinctly the wrong ethnicity or just an off the wall accent. Muh future space opera doesn't cut it when the disconnect is often so jarring. Bizarre when it's clear so much of the budget from this game went to VA and the game probably would be better with no VA at all. With all that above in mind, you should know this game is a collectathon/audiobook novel. Voice acting and writing are what the entire experience hinges on, but you are forced to absorb it all with backtracking and long stretches of driving. Imagine trying to read a good book (this game is a bad book) but needing to get in your car for 5-10 minutes to slowly read the next two sentences - all the while picking up mostly useless trinkets on the ground marked on a map. Those better be some profound impactful sentences! Nothing you do seems to move the needle in any way or impact the game. You just observe things as they unfold and drive. The entire game is patience and waiting. Which is a shame because there's the bones of a game that could have been really engaging. Cool car with boost built in? No race modes, no challenges, no unlockables, very little customization. Large map with shops, food, tons of npcs? No health bar, no puzzles, no npc interactions (other than the ones you're scripted to have), however there's lots of random drug dealers roaming around the map that seem to do nothing. Other obvious things that could have been interesting here are a jump button, some combat either as the character or in your car, or just a more dynamic city that responds to your decisions. I think it's possible there was a lot of cut content in this game. I'll give it that benefit of the doubt, and some of the talent working on this game deserves so much more. Thankfully reviews are decent and they'll find new work. But it's not enjoyable. No amount of steam punk/future/cyberpunk vibe makes up for a walk and talk audio novel that fails to deliver with its story and voice acting. Also the character models are UGLY, terrible use of pixel art every npc is a walking nightmare.