izigame.me

Anno Mutationem is a 2D hack and slash with 3D exploration and some RPG elements. It has a strong cyberpunk anime aesthetic clearly inspired in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost In the Shell even with some homages to them here and there. The game makes great use of 2D sprites over 3D backgrounds, the pixel art is gorgeous, the textures and color palettes used are very nice and the lighting and particle effects are great. It is a very good looking game. The music is great too specially during boss fights, as it is full of pumping electronic tracks enhancing the most epic moments. Character designs are hit-or-miss, main character is okay but the villains are just ridiculous and impossible to take seriously and the side-kick character is very annoying. The atmosphere in the cities is quite strong and well done though.

The game uses 3D for exploration and 2D for combat and platforming. Cities and open spaces are typically exploration sections in which NPCs, characters and some quests or puzzles can be found, and there is no combat or platforming during these 3D sections. The 2D parts typically take place on dungeons or in closed spaces like corridors, and the game seamlessly transitions between these two modes even inside the same location. Controls are snappy and responsive during combat, there are a few short-range weapons like swords, greatswords and double-edged swords, and long-range weapons like guns or rocket launchers. There aren't many weapons, most of them being very expensive and only a few of them could be found on the wild. Combat is quick and fun but enemies can be a bit spongy. Battles combining short-ranged and long-ranged enemies in an enclosed space require some thought and there is a number of different moves and epic finishers that can be executed. Money can be collected to purchase healing items, weapons and upgrades, but it is hard to come by and there aren't good places to farm for it (if any), the player can collect and sell junk but it doesn't yield much money. There is a bartender mini-game that yields money but only on the first playthrough (and I think it gets locked after completing all its levels?). Anyway, money is hard to get and at least in my experience it is best used in getting healing items as some bosses can be quite difficult and frustrating. Healing items take a while to take effect, which increases the difficulty.

Being an RPG-like game there are some cities that can be explored plot-wise and revisited mostly at will to complete some quests, the few of them that are present in the game anyway. Most of these quests suck, devolving into fetch quests or just going from point A to point B, or being so obtuse that there is almost no sensible clue about how to solve them, like the elevator puzzle. There are good quests though that makes you pay attention and gather clues through observation but there aren't many of them. There are dungeon stages that comprise the most of the enemies and bosses of the game, with most of the latter having quite cool (but hard) battles. These dungeons are mostly underground and have a lot of corridors, and some puzzles about doors, moving platforms or levers. In terms of platforming the level design is good (with the occasional frustrating section like the red lasers) and there is some backtracking to do but overall the dungeons are a little dull in contrast to the beautiful and colorful open spaces of the cities. The last dungeon in particular drags for far too long, it is annoying to traverse and cointains huge exposition dumps that are not fun (more on that later). It also contains surprise bosses and sudden difficulty spikes. The game is fairly linear, there aren't many cities and they are quite small, so there is not a huge amount to things to do here. That's a shame because I think that was the best part of the game and I wish there were more urban stages as the dungeons take the most part of the runtime.

In terms of character progression there isn't a traditional leveling system. Instead the game features a tech-tree that can be unlocked using two different kinds of EXP points. Blue points are acquired by defeating enemies (I'm not sure if these can be farmed as enemies seldom respawn) and are used to acquire more combos for the weapons, improve the speed of shots and things like that. Red points are obtained during special story moments and are used to increase stats like health, defense or offense and such. Special traversal abilities like double jump or wall climbing are acquired story-wise at no cost. There is not enough EXP to unlock the whole tree (and I don't think grinding is viable) so skills to upgrade must be chosen carefully. Weapons can be customized with chips giving them elemental damage and such but these chips are hard to come by and very expensive to purchase, also I'm not sure about what kind of enemies are susceptible to what kind of elemental damage, but chips can be swapped between weapons so there is some experimentation to do for the players willing to do it. Hacking is an integral part of the game too as some doors must be hacked in order to gain further access, via a timing-based minigame,and hacking abilities can be improved in the tech-tree by using blue EXP in order to ease these puzzles and provide more rewards like money and EXP. There is also a fishing mini-game too, and a DLC that includes a top-down shooter dungeon-crawler mini-game based on the side-kick.

The story is about a woman that is part of a private security company or something that is looking for her missing brother, which will lead to the uncovering of some conspiracies. Honestly the story easily the weakest part of the game, it is a complete mess, it barely makes sense and it is very hard to follow due to the amount of characters and the little information we have about them. The futuristic world is explained very slowly, with big concepts like complete mechanization of living beings, parallel universes or psychic/magical powers being introduced suddenly without any explanation whatsoever, and characters coming and going out of nowhere. The dialog is terrible, characters talk in a weird and mysterious way alluding to unexplained events, almost nobody identify themselves on introduction, and there are numerous translation, spelling and grammar errors in the script. There are also weird bits of anime-like humor that clash horribly with the more serious moments of the game, the tone can change from one scene to the next without notice, and in my opinion very few of the jokes land. The worse offense in my opinion are the HUGE exposition dumps in the last part of the game, delivered by the overused and dumb trope of the censored files that the player has to find and read, having key parts of them blackened out like if they were classified reports. The game does this a lot in the final dungeon, it makes harder to understand what is going on as there are big revelations near the end, it gets tiresome quickly and it was completely unnecessary.

Despite all the negatives I mentioned I do recommend this game because it is quite fun and it looks and sounds great. I liked the 2D-3D transitions a lot and I hope more action games take that route and provide rich areas to explore. There is an interesting world here that in my opinion it needs to be unfolded and explained in a better way, but it just looks like a bunch of cool concepts mashed up and rushed out. It fell short on many of my expectations but I want to judge it for what is instead of what it isn't, and it isn't a bad game at all. I don't think there is much replay value though unless you're really invested in the story or the sidequests, or if you want to try out other weapons and combos. I can't recommend Anno Mutationem for its story, but I can recommend it for everything else.