ArcRunner Review: Neon Lights Hide A Rather Dismal Sight
It says something about cyberpunk’s reach that they can take a brutal, neon-drenched setting full of cybernetics, social disorder and violent brawls and somehow spin that into an endlessly fascinating landscape for sci-fi fiends looking for a new take. The folks at Trickjump Games are taking cyberpunk into a roguelike, third-person arena with ArcRunner, a vivid and eye-catching adventure. This marriage of ideas seems simple enough, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, a bit more than I expected after my eyes acclimated to the neon glow…
Just A Quick Trip, In and Out
A friendly reminder that cybernetics DO eat your soul.
The plot goes something like this: Big ring planet is governed by an AI, and then it goes rogue. You take the role of a cybernetically-enhanced bot slayer ready to take to the neon-lit streets, gun down any robots wanting your life, and get the AI back in order by introducing it to a recovery drive. Simple, right? That’s all there is, really. I’ll admit, I’ve seen plenty of roguelikes with a bit more meat on their bones, but reading through even the Steam page will show that the story’s just there to give rhyme and reason to the robot-ravaging rampage. Then again, looking back on it, roguelikes didn’t often lean hard into their stories, so for me, the straight-to-the-point approach does no harm here.
Let’s get into the combat a bit, which boils down to you having a primary weapon, heavy weapons (as an unlockable), a melee weapon, a throwable gadget that recharges, and an ultimate ability (also unlockable later). There are two glaring flaws with these components. The first one is that weapons just don’t have any oomph to them; No real feeling of impact, no matter what weapon you use. The second issue, and this is a really souring one, is that the melee combat feels very clunky and slow—even when trying out the Samurai class—which made it feel mostly useless. It doesn’t swap quickly enough between melee and ranged weaponry, either. Enemies are very hard on you and will cluster up if you aren’t picking off troublemakers quickly. The clunkiness of the melee just makes it too disruptive to the flow of combat to really be the useful tool I’d hoped for.
Once you unlock it, you’ll have an armory where you can change what weapons you go into the run with. The thing is, they have little challenges you’ll need to complete in order to unlock the ability to choose them from the get-go. This isn’t too bad, though, because enemies drop enough weapons during the run that, even if you don’t start with the gun you want, you’ll probably find it down the road pretty quickly, unless it’s way back in the campaign. Where this all goes south is balancing, because some weapons are just not worth keeping, like the Plasma Bow, and some are so overpowered you won’t think about using anything else. I found myself just using the Viper SMG the whole way through because once it has a magazine upgrade and an autoloader mod, I found no other weapon worth keeping around besides maybe the Disc Launcher—and that’s only because that one doesn’t need reloading and has infinite ammo.
Something else of note that bothered me was that the enemy AI isn’t exactly a pinnacle of perception. While ArcRunner does wind up being rather challenging, the challenge factor tends to disappear a little once you figure out how bad the AI is at targeting and pathfinding. Much of the difficulty begins to fade when you learn that breaking their line of sight almost always ends the charging of their weapons, cutting off pressure from you. I’d often just weave through some background objects when the heat got too heavy and then turn around to pick off the ones still following. I didn’t really feel like I was getting better at the game, just finding new ways to cheese the AI, with bosses sometimes falling victim to it as well. Later levels kind of balance this out by introducing enemies that litter the floor with explosives, but those create their own issue of just spamming them way too often and making it too difficult to manage once the floor is as hectic as the airwaves. If it isn’t bullet hell, it’s grenade hell, and there are plenty of enemies around to make dealing with this much more painful than I feel is really necessary.
Running In The Neon Rain
You’ll learn quickly to fear that red circle.
The roguelike elements here are, for the most part, all accounted for. Granted, it doesn’t take long before the areas you you explore start to all look the same, and the Docks especially are very plain and dry, but you’re probably more here for slaying some robots anyways and still soaking up the neon glow. The thing is, some of the other roguelike elements are rather odd. For example, you can pick up mods for your weapons, and they often come with stat bumps to abilities that you may or may not have. It’s a little too specific for my liking, and I rarely found myself able to make use of them. What makes this even worse is where the end-of-section random upgrades are really bad about repeating themselves, which can make runs very rough if it keeps belching out upgrades unsuitable for the build you’re going for.
It’s salvageable, and I realize part of the role of RNG is occasionally crapping the bed on you, but sometimes it feels like it really can hamper the gameplay the way it’s handled here. And knowing how linear the levels can wind up being, you’re just going to resign bad runs to grind-up fodder, which sucks out the fun factor. Add in that aforementioned challenge, and early on, the game plays like quite the nightmare until you’ve grinded up some stat boosts and extra help. It’s good to have gameplay progression feel a little less merciless in death, and since Nanites, the expendable upgrade currency, carriy over after each run, you might find yourself needing to grind up more than you’d like to make sure you actually stand a chance if you aren’t just abusing some of the AI’s pathfinding issues. But I really am iffy on whether this was a real fix to the issue of early-game hell.
The sights and sounds lean hard into ArcRunner’s cyberpunk theme, never without the glow of Tron-like lights tracing a plethora of parts in the environment. The first level, set in a rain-soaked city, definitely had me feeling the Blade Runner-esque atmosphere, and as cold and harsh as it could be, it felt like it had the little embellishments and details to remind me why this is such a loved genre. I can safely say that it does exactly what it needs to here, almost a little too well. The biggest issue I can see cropping up with ArcRunner is that some players will find it to be a bit of a one-trick pony. It shoots for a theme with such vigor that it can be hard to see it for anything other than set dressing to a rather average roguelike, but in my view, I see this as something of a necessary evil. Chances are, if you’re heading to ArcRunner, you’re probably drawn in by the heavy cyberpunk aesthetics first and foremost, and I personally don’t see anything wrong with that. Unfortunately, it can leave others with an atmosphere that quickly wears out its welcome and fails to hide some of ArcRunners‘ more egregious errors. I admit, once I’ve exhausted the synthwave high I ride on during my killing spree, it’s hard to see much of a reason to stick around.
More Glitched Than Glam
Even though the game’s balancing and AI issues try their best to spoil the fun, ArcRunner still manages to deliver a satisfying cyberpunk roguelike experience. Despite its shortcomings—and they are plentiful— it can feel great to give into the temptation to jam to some synthwave and gun down some nameless bots for a few hours. It’s just a shame that, apart from the killer aesthetics, there isn’t much to compel players to return to its neon-saturated streets once they’ve finished their initial playthrough.
That said, if you’re looking for an in-depth approach to the familiar roguelike formula, you might want to look elswhere. Which is a shame, since ArcRunner offers a fairly decent gameplay loop along with a striking cyberpunk playground to go with it. If you’re looking to soothe that very specific aesthetic itch ArcRunner scratches, by all means, go for it and indulge in the wavey synths and rain-slicked streets. Just know that your mileage may vary.
Final Verdict: 3/5
Available on: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC (Reviewed); Publisher: PQube; Developer: Trickjump Games Limited; Number of players: 1; Released: April 27th, 2023; MSRP: $17.99
Full Disclosure: A copy of ArcRunner was provided by the publisher.
