Zipping around in your HOVA, zooming down neon corridors that feel alive with futuristic traffic and up and out across the foreboding night sky is a delightful experience in the PC version of this game, it's never less that hugely atmospheric stuff and it's added to immensely by the fact you can emerge from your hover car, slowly throttling down to street level and jumping out to explore various sketchy neighbourhoods on foot. Picking up jobs that see her ferry all manner of goods and passengers across the neon cityscape with direction provided by the rather shady Control, "never miss a delivery, never ask what's in the package", it's an intriguing tale that's well told through a handful of likeable characters and sees our protagonist slowly revealing shady truths about her employer and the tensions and rivalries that grip the streets below. This port is, in short, a bit of a mess.Ĭaptured on Nintendo Switch (Handheld/Undocked)Ĭloudpunk's story, which takes place across one long night in the city, sees you assume the role of Rania, a newcomer to these mean streets who's taken a position with the semi-legal Cloudpunk delivery service. ![]() More than any other title we've played in recent memory, Cloudpunk relies on its setting, on the graphical wizardry of its artists and the intricately woven atmosphere they've created in order to sell its story, and so it's really a rather huge problem that this Switch port of the game - outsourced here to Merge Games, who have also handled the reportedly problematic PS4 and Xbox versions - struggles on almost every level to deliver the wonder of Nivalis intact to Nintendo's hybrid console. This is a world where flying cars, known here as HOVAs, zoom around in an impossibly dangerous mess of light and metal, where the clouds above the city boil and rage, enormous billboards sell desperate denizens unattainable dreams and monolithic skyscrapers stretch off in every direction. A wonderfully evocative voxel art city, it immediately transports us to a future that so precisely recalls the neon-drenched storefronts, rain-soaked streets and seedy underbelly of the dystopian vision of Los Angeles we all know and love from Blade Runner. ![]() Nivalis, the futuristic metropolis in which the events of Cloudpunk take place, really is the heart and soul of Ion Lands' captivating "neon noir" adventure game.
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