Review GigaDeathNullGolem 3/5 · Mar 28, 2024
Better than I remembered but still janky and flawed
Neocron IS an MMORPG that is very similiar to Anarchy Online. The sequel was IIRC just an update to the game with some minor things tweaked (what they were i could not tell you)
the titular Dome of York is location in the game and probably a reference to Max Max Beyond Thunderdome and Escape from New York. Currently, …
Neocron IS an MMORPG that is very similiar to Anarchy Online. The sequel was IIRC just an update to the game with some minor things tweaked (what they were i could not tell you)
the titular Dome of York is location in the game and probably a reference to Max Max Beyond Thunderdome and Escape from New York. Currently, about 50-100 players can be found online at any given time, a good number of them hailing from Germany (where the devs live)
You might notice that the UI looks very similiar to a few titles published by Eidos: Deus Ex, System Shock 2. For that reason I chose the name IonStorm as my character.
levelling in this game (like many mmos) is not a good time, and it's greatest flaw. You have to farm the same critters over and over using a bulletin board system. To make it not just repeititve but quite un-fun. this task is very arbitrary: Only certain critter live in certain dungeons, and only certain critters have such a bounty system. This means that youre going to spend dozens of hours hunting the same god damn BIG BLACK ROACH until you can unlock a new tier of gear. They should have called it Cyberpunk Exterminator.
Now dont get me wrong, i do love a good cyberpunk setting for pest control (Rutger Hauer in Split Second, 1992) no matter how cheesy or budgety but only after so long. But you'll be doing bug hunting on a meta level in this game as well. Vanishing items that appear and reappear. Stuff moving and crawling around in your inventory. Weapons that keep unholstering and reholstering themselves. (Hint: log out and log back in) Oh and don't forget the lack of hand holding... Building your character is like an oil rig with no guardrails in place. you better know exactly what you are doing and why. You can respec, but its gonna cost ya!
After a certain point grinding up ze bugs you get to a point where you can actually take your vehicle out and explore the world. However, dying in this game is super-annoying and from a risk vs reward standpoint it seems to discourage random explorations that result in you dying. The solution in this generation of MMOs? Never play alone Not exactly practical in a game of 50 or so players, all of whove played the story (haha... ooh that's a sinker of a joke) and such and just wanna do PvP and clannish saber-rattling.
I'd dare say the game is worth a look at to anyone who finds it potentially interesting. No, it doesnt have a LOT of writing, but the item descriptions are cool and everything is super cyberpunky and techy. You got all kinds of weapons, armor, implants, drugs, tools etc, and they all look cool. It's one of the few online games where you can actually just drop an item in the world and it gets its own model. (Am unsure if these things ever despawn, it looks like they dont) Player belts drop on death which mark effectively as 'graves' for long offline accounts who never tried to retrieve their stuff. Between it's DX-inspired aesthetic (and music! Made by Steve Roach is awesome!) it surprisingly atmospheric and immersive. there are only a handful of MMO FPS games like this, none of them good, all of them aged poorly. It's unfortunate that for everything Neocron got right, there is not just one thing it got wrong but two more things that remain unfished. NPC dialogue is missing, either never implemented or pulled out of the game. Items exist in the game that serve no purpose, hinting at scrapped features that never made it Beyond the Dome of York.
Well I technically did, and let me tell you its very overrated. Stick to the sewers and playing the part of post-apocalytpic pest control, and call it a day after you get bored.