Replaced (2026)

This game has such an incredible presentation. I am in love with the cinematography, which is not something I thought I would ever say about a 2D pixel-art-style game. It feels much more artistic and 3-dimensional than such a game ever would. The basic gameplay is fine enough: standard platforming, moving boxes, and combat. The combat works well for me with batman style dodge, counter, light, heavy, and some special attacks that require charging. It was nothing groundbreaking but extremely satisfying.

However, the big downside for me is the story and main character. While I haven't played it all the way through, the story seems to be a mega-corporation that claims to do good for its citizens but is secretly doing a lot of evil to enrich a couple of key villains (whom I have not met yet). And while it is fine that lots of games retread this it hinges on the main character. And therein lies the problem.

The main character is a fish-out-of-water but completely empty vessel. He is thrust from his comfy corpo life into being on the run and live amongst the cast outs of the corporation. He doesn't seem very phased by this nor does he express much shock or desire to fix things. His motivation to get back to his old life isn't very believable because he is so emotionless. It just doesn't work for me to drive me to see this through. Such a shame.

I really want to like this game more than I do, but sadly, I think there are just too many knocks against it, with only 1 upside.

To start with the positive, the artstyle. Man, it's just really great looking throughout. There were some moments where I felt I was getting a little bored of the unique artstyle, and then some new scene would happen and I would be wowed again. I am definitely excited to see where the studio can take this style if they have future projects.

Now for the bad. First, the story. Technically, I don't know if I would consider this bad, but I also wouldn't consider it good. There is some background stuff going on, but I was given no reason at all to care about it. The actual main story presented is incredibly bland, and the characters are fine, but nothing special at all It also felt incredibly lazy that the good character "betrayed" everyone at the end.

The combat is Arkham combat but 2d, but also in a really bad way. This bleeds into the "platforming" the game has as well, but things just don't feel responsive and good, it feels like there is molasses everywhere. I would want to be doing something fluid, and the game just doesn't allow it. Additionally, there is basically no variety to combat at all, so by the 2nd hour in, outside of some flashes in some fights, it gets boring fast.

The exploration is pretty terrible. You would think for an on-rails game like this that the "exploration" would be made to feel good with how little there is, but the jumping and moving mechanics are so slow and wonky that it was aggravating. Similarly, I despised how you couldn't fast forward any dialogue in the whole game. For a text box or two is fine, but for an entire game it was incredibly annoying.

Overall, I want to like this game more and I definitely feel passion behind it, but actually playing it was a chore, and I actually ended up dropping it 75% through and just watching a playthrough of the ending, and after doing so, I definitely felt like it was the right decision. Solid 5/10