![]() It’s this last part which is the first of my big question marks over Cloudpunk. There’s few surprises thrown at you in terms of navigation, with each delivery job being to take a package somewhere, find a parking spot, and then get out on foot to find the NPC you’re delivering to. Each layer of the city is stuffed full of blue highways which offer a further passive speed boost while you’re driving on them, but since the car density on them is so high it’s often easier to just fly normally at max altitude and go directly to your destination instead of zig-zagging around city blocks. ![]() There’s a grand total of two mechanically useful upgrades you can buy for your car: a boost module, which has a fuel supply that depletes while you’re boosting but which instantly refills to full the moment it’s empty ( why?), and a second boost module for lateral movement. ![]() Car controls are very simple: forward and back, left and right, up and down (although you’re locked to a certain altitude range and can’t just fly up through city layers), and that’s pretty much it. ![]() In terms of actual gameplay, though, what you’re doing is pretty much what you would expect to be doing in a game about a delivery company: flying to a navpoint indicating your pickup point, picking up a package, and then driving it to a second navpoint to drop it off. It’s all surprisingly well-executed for an indie title, and Nivalis is the part of the game where all of the right decisions were made and Cloudpunk very definitely punches above its weight. The idea is that Nivalis is essentially a set of giant mile-high arcologies and so the city is split into several vertical layers - you transition between them by driving off the side, with the explanation being that you’re actually going up/down a magic car elevator - and each region has its own distinct style, from the gleaming neon spires of the corporate heights to the gloomy murk of the sump at the bottom of the city. There’s a huge range of different buildings with the surfaces liberally plastered with corporate ads, ad-drones flying around blasting out corporate propaganda 1, trains hurtling around the city, and the spaces between everything liberally filled with flying cars. The lack of detail ends up helping rather than hindering, since I imagine it was much faster to crank out assets and you can’t tell it’s made of crude blocks until you get right up close to it - and even then it doesn’t look bad at all, with the shop fronts and office buildings having a quite charmingly simple look to them, like Lego Cyberpunk. Its rendition of the city of Nivalis is one of the best depictions of a cyberpunk city I’ve seen in a videogame it’s using a voxel-based engine and so everything has a chunky, blocky look to it, kind of like Minecraft with smaller cubes, but while this visual style might have been enforced by the voxels it actually works out quite well for Cloudpunk once you get used to it. I like Walking Simulators provided they’re handled correctly, and Cloudpunk has quite a lot going for it here. It’s not that Cloudpunk is, essentially, a Walking Simulator. It’s clearly a labour of love made by real people who have been on the receiving end of some of this stuff themselves, and unlike certain other big-ticket cyberpunk releases that are scheduled (for now) to come out this year, Cloudpunk’s heart is definitely in the right place. Where modern “cyberpunk” properties tend to co-opt the look but not the themes, Cloudpunk at least understands what cyberpunk should be. You drive around the city, taking packages from point A to point B, while people talk to you over the comm about the city, the world, corporations, identity, AI, androids, the rich getting obscenely richer, the poor being trapped by debt and prejudice and left to die the moment they’re not economically useful - all of that classic cyberpunk shit that’s becoming uncomfortably real as we hurtle headfirst into a capitalist dystopia of our own. You’re playing Rania, the driver of a flying car in a cyberpunk city on her first day of work for underground delivery organisation Cloudpunk.
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