PREVIEW: Glitchpunk Early Access

By GamingCouchPotato.co.uk Staff

Before I start let me make it clear that the game is Early Access, for those who do not know, that means it is not finished, and often nowhere near finished, it means the game is barebones, something that the developers can release that lets people play the game, and in turn help them find bugs, get ideas, improve gameplay and so on.

It is a bit like releasing the first chapter draft of a book you are writing, so please keep all of this in mind any time you play an Early Access title.

Onto the game itself, Glitchpunk is a top-down action game, think the original GTA games but in a dystopian future. I really hate the word dystopian; everything has to be dystopian these days! come on guys, be original!

In Glitchpunk you shoot, steal and drive your way around as you maim your victims, you are an android bounter hunter. You have a "glitch" in your programming which allows you to break your programming, yes, I know, not the most original idea, but we are in a dystopian future after all. Anyway, since you have broken your programming, you have decided that you want to "destabilize the tyrannical governments of the post-nuclear world", and as such you just want to cause havoc. There are gangs to kill, police to take on, and generally trouble to cause.

As you play, you will accept contracts, earn money to make upgrades, buy cybernetic modules which give you new abilities, for example the ability to hack into others and control their behaviour, make alliances, lose alliances and more.

As of writing there is only one city to play in, eventually there will be 4.

In general, this game is GTA but with modern graphics.

The Good

As with all Early Access games, the question always has to be "does this game have potential?" And Glitchpunk has all the potential in the world. Is it very cliché and full of unoriginal ideas? Yes, but still that is not always a bad thing if done well.

The Bad

I hate to say this, but as of right now, the game is pretty bad, numerous graphical errors, poor optimisation, frame drops, freezing, never ending loading screens, poor physics, I could go on, but I keep reminding myself that this is an early access game.

Overall

The game has potential, but I wonder if the game is cursed by the "punk" part of the title. We all know the disaster of the Cyberpunk release, perhaps Glitchpunk should have a name rethink?

A long, long way to go, but the potential is there. Either change the graphical style to be much simpler, or work on that optimisation, even on a decent PC the game really struggled.

By GamingCouchPotato.co.uk Staff