KickStarter Mechajammer (formerly Copper Dreams) - cyberpunk RPG from Whalenought Studios

[V_K]

It's somewhat upsetting that with the recent wave of cyberpunk games, we didn't really get any good RPGs out of the deal. There's a few minor titles by indies that are worth looking at, and there's the upcoming Cyber Knights by the Trese Brothers, and maybe Colony Ship, which may not be exactly cyberpunk but definitely has the vibe.

Midnight Protocol looks interesting, even if its RPG-ness is dubious.

 

[orcinator]

It's out?
It sucks?
Damn.

Did someone make a collage of the art styles?

 

[CyberWhale]

I wanted to give the game a bit more of a try, see if I could get to the open-world section and try to track down some quests. Managed to kill Three-Arm. Knock-out is insanely overpowered, but also the only way I could possibly win that fight. I was using a knife, which I have zero skill in. Pretty silly all around.

Anyway, looted all the stuff around the warehouse district and was actually starting to have a bit fun, until I went back to where I was supposed to be and found the drawbridge I had lowered earlier was now up, with no way to put it down again from the side of it I was on. So basically, I'm trapped and can't progress in any way now. Yeeeesh. So much is wrong with this release, from what I just described with that combat encounter to the insane bugs. I just don't get it.

There is another terminal for lowering the bridge on this side, buy I can't find the password. Also unable to kill Three-Arm (looting him does provide a password for some terminal, not sure if it's for the previously mentioned one or not) because I can't knock him down, grenades and pistols don't do any damage, and knife is barely effective (I have invested heavily in it) so I would basically have to waste time running from the foe to abuse self-regeneration. Not interested in doing that, mostly because combat seems to be trash overall (would have preferred a classical turn-based ala Fallout or heck, even party-based jRPG blobber).

Respawning enemies, locked doors and items in general make this a chore to play. When you add the god-awful decision of being unable to click on FOW areas this p.much ends up being unplayable. Esc doesn't work sometimes, and you can't even go to the main menu in some cases (started a New Game by mistake and had to force close the app and run it again to load a quick save). Hard pass at the moment, although I'm not sure if this will be worth a playthrough even with bugfixes/patches considering the boring combat and how barebones the story is.

 

[Gradenmayer]

Yeah it's only one mission. There will be some sort of update today (hopefully).

Anyway I recorded this but went to sleep and forgot to put it here. I'm still not used to the system so yeah it might be tedious to watch me playing.


I realized there was no sound when I finished and it was the better playthrough so I tried to record it again but with doing more stupid stuff

Kinda funny how this version played better than the release one

 

[Ninjerk]

Yeah it's only one mission. There will be some sort of update today (hopefully).

Anyway I recorded this but went to sleep and forgot to put it here. I'm still not used to the system so yeah it might be tedious to watch me playing.


I realized there was no sound when I finished and it was the better playthrough so I tried to record it again but with doing more stupid stuff

Kinda funny how this version played better than the release one

If only someone would Kickstart a game like that!

 

[Tyranicon]

Copper Dreams looked sweet in it's Alpha stage, placeholder graphics and all. It's a shame that version of the game was binned.

 

[Lyre Mors]

There is another terminal for lowering the bridge on this side, buy I can't find the password.

Thanks, found it. Don't know how I overlooked it before. Felt like I had walked everywhere. Disregard my last post - the bridge raising wasn't a bug afterall, it was by design. Somewhat strange design, but design non-the-less.

CyberWhale, here's the password for that terminal if you want it. For some reason you can't access the document you find in Three-Hand's office again after the first time (bug? UI element I'm missing? Some "printouts" show on your map, some don't). Luckily I wrote it down in my notepad just in case.

Spoiler

Username: ADMIN
Passcode: YOQQG

 

[CyberWhale]

Password is randomly generated and thus can not be used. You need to pry it from the cold dead hands of Three-Arm, and like I've said, I'm not planning to run circles around him to regenerate my health just to hit him once and repeat the process ad nauseum. Good luck in playing the game, hopefully you can finish it and provide us with insight whether the game will be worth a playthrough if shit gets fixed eventually (not holding my breath honestly).

 

[Lyre Mors]

Yeah, we'll see. I'm probably going to be waiting for at least a few patches before digging in properly. Or at least until I can actually see my dice rolls in a log. Just wanted to explore the world a bit, and see what it has to offer overall.

 

[Infinitron]

RIP: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/mechajammer-review

Mechajammer review: a broken, brown disaster
Browning my sorrows



If I had to describe Mechajammer in a word, that word would be "brown". A second would be the sounds Joe Pesci makes in Home Alone.

When the first few dilemmas you face in an RPG aren't ethical or character ones, but about whether it would be more tedious to continue with this character or to play through the introduction again, you know there's a problem. By my third restart I'd abandoned all interest in playing any character I wanted, and started trying to estimate whatever would get this over with sooner. Mechajammer is a disaster. And not only because of the bugs.

In theory, and its trailers, and even in an earlier demo, Mechajammer is a stylish, complex, intriguingly messy cyberpunk RPG with a chaotic retro look.

In practice, the first thing you do is blunder around a brown area punching rats. This is a game with a rat problem. Almost any time you find an unopened door, the answer to "what's in here?" will be "nothing" or "rats". As someone whose first day at a job once included killing a rat with a pipe, I am begging any game developers reading to trust me on this: fighting rats is not difficult, interesting, or remotely rewarding. Please, please, please stop making us fight fucking rats.

Whalenought Studios have, to their credit, improved on Serpent In The Staglands, their game in which you can be beaten to death by a fox. The rats in Mechajammer are no threat at all and die at the slightest touch. Which raises the question of why they're here. Not only are they prone to jumping you the instant you enter a room, they'll sometimes detect you through a wall and run out of a building (locking the door behind them) to chase you down the street. I've had one leap out of a locker to attack me, which also somehow made it impossible to move away from the locker, forcing yet another glitchy reload, thus more rats. Mechajammer has a glitch problem, particularly around loading the game, conversations, and opening your inventory.



The second thing you'll do is circle this brown area over and over until by sheer chance you happen to stand in the empty corner of the brown room where the computer is, and some text pops up to tell you the login you need to clear the path ahead. You could try hacking the computer, but it probably won't work. In this new area you'll blunder around some brown alleys, through crowds of homeless people in brown clothes. Another computer in one of the brown rooms will want a password, so you'll wander round some more, sometimes being attacked by some angry gangsters. And here's where you learn how fiddly and buggy the combat is, because there's no way to avoid it.

Much like Fates Of Ort, a better game, Mechajammer's combat mode only moves when you do. Exploration is real-time but when a hostile sees you, time pauses and only moves when you take action. My excitement at the many weapon skills was gone by the third restart.

If you use guns you will do little damage, miss most shots, and find several bullets. If you use one of the half a dozen melee options like flails or polearms, your starting weapon will soon break and it'll be hours before you find another, or a repair kit - which I'm not sure actually exist. If you use throwing weapons, a sorely under-represented option in most games, you'll soon realise two things: that your character doesn't automatically lead her shots, and that you'll have to painstakingly pick up every tiny knife again one by one. Also you'll frequently throw other weapons by accident, forgetting what attack mode you were in. Whatever you use, your character will often refuse to move, or take a swing at the air as you try to click on the sesame seed-sized outline of a target.

Spoiler

Pixel hunting is half the game, to the extent that I offered a bounty to any colleague who could find the gun I was looking for in one brown screenshot. There's a slight shimmering effect that at least keeps Mechajammer from 90s adventure game levels, but the tiny, brown graphics make most items impossible to recognise. The heaps of items are mostly redundant or useless, and at the time of writing it's impossible to sell any item to anyone. Not that I've found any shops that had more to sell than the same cigarettes I was dumping in the street, or a rope with a placeholder icon. Truly, dear customer, my new business is your one-stop shop for some cigarettes and a rope.

The pixel hunting is made worse when you have lackeys, as they'll get in the way. I've found no clear limit to how many lackeys you can recruit, a feature that sounds exciting enough that mentioning it feels like misrepresentation. Almost any non-hostile NPC can be "charmed" without cost or risk, whereupon they will immediately become your loyal mindslave, willing to play high-stakes Bludgeon with anything in your path. In the run I stuck with, I put several points (actually dice. Whenever a skill is used, deeces are rolled, and instead of directly increasing skills, you add another cube to the pool) into "social" purely so I could use the charm option on the hordes of homeless people wandering around, and send them to die for me so I wouldn't have to kite a dozen gangsters one at a time. You can even give them weapons, and in another cool-sounding feature, lackeys will attempt to heal you when you die..



Unfortunately this means that when you die with a crowd you'll have to sit and wait for them all to fail in turn before you can reload. It's very slightly faster to alt+f4 it. But the main downside is that their sprites blocking your mouse from those pixel hunts. You'll have to recruit them all one by one, waiting for the little animation each time, and there's no way to tell them apart without talking to them, which depends on them staying still. It also makes a lot of conversations redundant, as you can simply mindslave almost anyone instead of dealing with their opinions.

Although, that's not a huge loss given that the dialogue system is... barely a system at all. Most people have nothing to say, the few exceptions ambushing you to spout meaningless nothing and run off before you can respond, only occasionally prompting you to reply with "ok" or "bye", or opening your inventory. This invites them to say they have no use for any of your items, or to somehow glitch into an unrecoverable quantum state where everyone you talk to has all your money and won't give it back. One guard called me "scum" and then immediately became my loyal mindslave when I clicked on "charm". An "evangelist" yelled at me to repent and asked me to join him. when I did, nothing happened. When I did a second time, time skipped ahead 12 hours, changing nothing. When I clicked "charm" on him he, too, immediately became my mindslave. A guard in another area warned me to leave, which I agreed to do, and while I walked away my homeless mindslaves attacked him. The area he was guarding contained nothing.

"Tell me more" type dialogue options will sometimes quit the conversation instead, forcing yet another reload when it cuts you off from plot critical information or brown items. Not that there's any plot to speak of so far. I'm on the run from Earth with two people and a robot, none of whom matter or do anything. We're stuck on Planet Brown and to escape we have to punch every rat in the universe. Your character knows nothing and cares about nothing, and the only effect of the colourful-sounding, faintly Darklands-ish jobs, age, and perk/flaw system I've discerned is that if at any point you pick the "PTSD" flaw, your soldier will become catatonic for ten minutes if he fires his own weapon. Even without this, you'll die often. The health regeneration and tendency of most enemies go down quickly are the welcome mercies keeping it from a total wash, but you are still woefully outnumbered and will die without constantly feeding more homeless people to the enemy. Stealth is just the same thing but slower.

The "Ooh!" moment that happens when brown vehicles first appear gives way to the knowledge that they brake for everyone but you, including on the narrow, very long, brown bridges that become a strange hybrid of Frogger and Syndicate as you attempt to dodge between cars with 15 swarming mindslaves in tow. When the riots appear, you'll again think the game's finally out of its awful Temple Of Trials period, but no. This is not the lively faction war someone hinted at. It's just some animations that kill you if you walk into them. At one point I got across a long bridge but was trapped between a deadly riot and a deadly car, which is when I found out that you can even be run over when you're trying to save the game, since not even opening the menu will pause, which is doubly odd when being spotted by a rat does.



The bridges bring me on to navigation, which is a total pain in the arse. The main view is isometric and the map doesn't mark most landmarks or your position, making the brown streets confusing to get around as it's also upside down. Retro is one thing, but a map so archaic it predates the concept of North is new to me. Movement is worse, as its interpretation of line of sight bars even attempting to move somewhere you can't see, such as, for example, through a door. You have to push the door open, then awkwardly shuffle through it, then inside the brown room, then either fight some rats or realise it's empty, then do it all again to get out. That's if it doesn't get stuck and force you to hokey cokey in and out of the doorway a few times. Walking around corners indoors is like programming a roomba in real-time while your housemate formats it every few seconds, and the one good thing I can say about the doors is that they're not brown. It’s just endless shuffling and clicking and trudging back and forth on an ugly, empty map with annoying, often unresponsive controls and no reason to care about anything.

I could go on with describing Mechajammer's flaws and failures for far, far longer than I could stand playing it any more. The sheer relief at exorcising my complaints are the closest I've come to enjoying it since my brief excitement at the promise of its character creation screen. Between its awful, threadbare design and a shocking number of bugs and major glitches, this has been an absolutely miserable experience and not even close to fit for release.

 

[mediocrepoet]

So uh... you think RPS liked it?

 

[wishbonetail]

So Serpent is just swell and Mecha is 50 shades of brown. Why is it always cyberpunk that has to suffer?

 

[BlackGoat]

Bummer how it all turned out. Imagine if they'd been designing actual levels for the past 5 years instead of.... whatever it is they were doing

 

[Lyre Mors]

After playing for 6 hours and giving the game a solid chance in its current state, I can say that RPS review is probably 25% her being an impatient retard, and 75% accurate, which is better than most RPS reviews. What she nails in it is that, regardless of what details she might be missing here and there, the game feels like a prototype more than a proper game. Not only because of the bugs, but because finding actual content in the endless expanse of random mobs battling it out on the street feels like an easter egg rather than a properly implemented part of gameplay.

The systems are half-baked, the combat seems like some absurd abomination created to appease both rogue-like fans and ARPG fans - rather than the tactical combat fans that supported them from the beginning. You can get through any situation by simply knocking your opponent out and walking away while they are passed out. And hell, since there is no experience gained from killing enemies, and rarely any loot worth picking up from their corpses, you're missing almost nothing by doing so. I walked into a random room on the side of the road, and got ambushed by a gang of six thugs that crawled out of some sewer grates behind me. A legitimately cool and hand-placed encounter that was completely trivialized when I knocked them each out one by one, grabbed the loot containers, jumped over their sleeping bodies, and walked away with my health regenerated. This is a character with ZERO skill in melee. And yes, regenerating health goes even further to illegitimize nearly every encounter, or the consequences of said encounter.

I can't fathom how a publisher decided to pick this game up, how they felt comfortable with it being released in this state, how Hannah and Joe could feel good about this releasing in this state, or really how any of this occurred to begin with. I walk away from this game confused and extremely disappointed, and without any hope of it amounting to a solid game someday. I left some feedback in their discord last night, but it was all so obvious that I couldn't help but feel the hopelessness in the effort. If Whalenought survives this, it'll take a lot for me to ever buy another game from them. I'm sorry if you guys are reading this and it is hurtful in any way, but man, what the hell happened?

 

[Gradenmayer]

We should make a term for this type of development cycle. Let's call it CP77. It's a development approach where, instead of spending a year or two putting the full design of the game on paper, you start shitting out expensive prototypes and use them for marketing. Shortly after, current prototype gets hastily thrown into the garbage and next one goes into development. The cycle repeats, until all the money and time are wasted. Last experimental turd gets put out as a product.

 

[mediocrepoet]

We should make a term for this type of development cycle. Let's call it CP77. It's a development approach where, instead of spending a year or two putting the full design of the game on paper, you start shitting out expensive prototypes and use them for marketing. Shortly after, current prototype gets hastily thrown into the garbage and next one goes into development. The cycle repeats, until all the money and time are wasted. Last experimental turd gets put out as a product.

I think the saddest statement about the game industry right now, apparently all the way down to the indies, is that I don't find this even a bit edgy. This could be a wikipedia entry describing the product cycle.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

We should make a term for this type of development cycle. Let's call it CP77. It's a development approach where, instead of spending a year or two putting the full design of the game on paper, you start shitting out expensive prototypes and use them for marketing. Shortly after, current prototype gets hastily thrown into the garbage and next one goes into development. The cycle repeats, until all the money and time are wasted. Last experimental turd gets put out as a product.

Actually starting to prototype the game early to check if your ideas are valid is a good approach. It's continuous changes of direction and throwing previous work away that are the problem.

 

[Tyranicon]

Proper project management is much harder than most people would expect.

Making games is hard.

Making longform RPGs is even harder.

 

[buffalo bill]

I swear that about a year and a half ago there was a beta of Mechajammer (or maybe it was still 'Copper Dreams' at that point) containing a playable game with tactical combat in a single arena-mode map. I was very hopeful they would build on that relatively solid foundation, but the devs unfortunately scrapped essentially all of the good features from that phase of the beta, as well as ignored essentially all of the feedback that I gave them (and there was quite a lot of it, actually). The feedback I gave back then is similar to many of the criticisms that the final release is getting. Of course, I knew that the final release would be shit, though, since every beta this year was shit—a game can't suddenly transform from shit to non-shit in a few weeks.

It is very sad that this happened, and I hope the devs are personally OK, but I also won't support future projects of theirs.

 

[Ninjerk]

I swear that about a year and a half ago there was a beta of Mechajammer (or maybe it was still 'Copper Dreams' at that point) containing a playable game with tactical combat in a single arena-mode map. I was very hopeful they would build on that relatively solid foundation, but the devs unfortunately scrapped essentially all of the good features from that phase of the beta, as well as ignored essentially all of the feedback that I gave them (and there was quite a lot of it, actually). The feedback I gave back then is similar to many of the criticisms that the final release is getting. Of course, I knew that the final release would be shit, though, since every beta this year was shit—a game can't suddenly transform from shit to non-shit in a few weeks.

It is very sad that this happened, and I hope the devs are personally OK, but I also won't support future projects of theirs.

Yes, I played that beta. It looked as muddy as the current interation, although it had a different palette and 3D models.

 

[buffalo bill]

I swear that about a year and a half ago there was a beta of Mechajammer (or maybe it was still 'Copper Dreams' at that point) containing a playable game with tactical combat in a single arena-mode map. I was very hopeful they would build on that relatively solid foundation, but the devs unfortunately scrapped essentially all of the good features from that phase of the beta, as well as ignored essentially all of the feedback that I gave them (and there was quite a lot of it, actually). The feedback I gave back then is similar to many of the criticisms that the final release is getting. Of course, I knew that the final release would be shit, though, since every beta this year was shit—a game can't suddenly transform from shit to non-shit in a few weeks.

It is very sad that this happened, and I hope the devs are personally OK, but I also won't support future projects of theirs.

Yes, I played that beta. It looked as muddy as the current interation, although it had a different palette and 3D models.

Specifically, I thought the beta that was out around October 2020 (page 108-ish of this thread) had promise

 

[Ninjerk]

I swear that about a year and a half ago there was a beta of Mechajammer (or maybe it was still 'Copper Dreams' at that point) containing a playable game with tactical combat in a single arena-mode map. I was very hopeful they would build on that relatively solid foundation, but the devs unfortunately scrapped essentially all of the good features from that phase of the beta, as well as ignored essentially all of the feedback that I gave them (and there was quite a lot of it, actually). The feedback I gave back then is similar to many of the criticisms that the final release is getting. Of course, I knew that the final release would be shit, though, since every beta this year was shit—a game can't suddenly transform from shit to non-shit in a few weeks.

It is very sad that this happened, and I hope the devs are personally OK, but I also won't support future projects of theirs.

Yes, I played that beta. It looked as muddy as the current interation, although it had a different palette and 3D models.

Specifically, I thought the beta that was out around October 2020 (page 108-ish of this thread) had promise

Page 98 appears to be about the place in this thread where the current game look/feel was "locked in" and some of the better looking 3D was present until at least Nov. 2019 (page 93?).

 

[Tyranicon]

So kind of curious, how did Joe and Hannah become so well-known here? As far as I know, SiTS is as small as they come and not very well-received on the codex. Were they frequent posters at some point in the past?

 

[Antigoon]

Yeah, especially Joe was pretty active here during SiTS development. Pretty sure he was the one actually introducing the game here first.

 

[buffalo bill]

So kind of curious, how did Joe and Hannah become so well-known here? As far as I know, SiTS is as small as they come and not very well-received on the codex. Were they frequent posters at some point in the past?

I think a lot of people felt that SitS, though not a great game, had promise, and that made them hopeful about copper dreams. Especially because the setting and initial pitch (sort of a grandia-style combat system in a western cyberpunk RPG) sounds cool on paper. H&J would also sometimes post here