Titan City

Subbed! Sounds awesome :)

Enjoy the demo Max McGee. It sounds like you might be a fan of the genre so I hope the work I've done so far meets your expectations.

Um, a bit more than that XD. I write for Shadowrun.

Gonna play this now, my thoughts soon.

EDIT: Ok, so my initial impression is that this game has a LOT of potential but it needs a LOT of work. First off, I want to say that I understand the demo I played is not current so some of the following has probably been addressed--but some of it is so fundamental that I would be surprised if it had been entirely addressed and resolved by now.

I'm going to start by giving my general impressions of the game VERY BRIEFLY (okay not that briefly) in the form of a micro-mini (ok not that mini) review then I'm going to make an offer--by PM--you may want to think about for a while.

Story: I did not get to experience much of this due to some pretty fundamental issues with the gameplay discussed below, so I haven't really formed an opinion yet. I have noticed that there are a lot of typos and spelling errors, far more than I would consider acceptable even in an amateur project. As one egregious example, the boilerplate text of "Your hightened awareness lets you notice" has the word 'heightened' misspelled in every single example. Besides major presentation issues, the story has some other problems. Obviously, I played as Johnny Li. The game seems to want to depict Johnny as being an elite hacker (which is not reinforced mechanically at all see gameplay below) while simultaneously treating him as being a total noob with no idea he is doing for the purposes of the tutorial. You can't have it both ways--the attempt to comes off as not just awkward but really awfully tortured and lame--you have to pick one and stick to it. Additionally, I found the introduction of one conflict--between the multinational Megacorps and the US Government--shortly before we're thrust into another street-level conflict between rival criminal gangs--to be sort of baffling. I know that it will probably all connect later on.

Pseudo-Score For Present Build: 30/100

Gameplay: I didn't even play around with the character creation system since the game recommended I use the pre-built "Johnny Li" but I can tell that there has been a ton of effort put into this and it is trying to accommodate a ton of interesting ideas that are very non-standard to RPG Maker games. That said, this is one of the most sprawlingly, exaggeratedly over-ambitious RM games I have ever seen and was obviously crippled with the burden of overwhelming scope creep before development could progress beyond a rudimentary stage. For starters, 14 fully customizable playable characters with their own story paths is a wildly unattainable goal. While I respect the youthful ambition, you need to reign yourself in and be substantially more realistic in the expectations you set for yourself. Making matters worse, there is a seemingly total lack of polish and presentation here that is really off-putting.

At present, the demo is actually basically unplayable.

After an insanely difficult VR fight with the DEMON 5.0 Intrusion Countermeasure program in the Matrix node of a simple security panel, I was left with a mere 6 Health. For starters, that fight is much, much too difficult to be the first fight of your game. I barely pulled through and it took all of the skills I have developed over 10+ years of playing RPG Maker games AND excellent luck for that. The fact that the fight is optional doesn't help. You are effectively just punishing the player that chooses to have their hacker hack. Evening out this issue is as easy as putting a full heal after the Matrix fight inside the security panel node.

Anyway, you have only a couple healing items and moments later you are forced into a fight "in the meaT" with two Hammer gang members...I still had 6 Health, so needless to say, I died, and I quit playing there out of frustration. I obviously experienced very little of this game, far less than would be ideal, but even in that short time I encountered multiple game design decisions that I found to be ugly, problematic, stupid, and/or indefensible.



So if your Technical stat is higher, you can DRINK THIS JUICE IN A SMARTER WAY and get more hit points from it? I am sorry sir, but that is retarded. This mechanic makes perfect sense with a medical kit or something of that ilk. But when applied to a can of Red Bull it is just painfully dumb.

Pseudo-Score for Present Build: 20/100

Graphics: Man this area needs a whole lot of work.


First off, I should not be able to access the menu during character selection. Disable yer damn menu, youngster. Secondly, that face graphic is ffffffuggggggggleeeee.

The tilesets and map graphics are...adequate. The mapping is not great but for now it will serve. The title screen could be a LOT better. The Game Over screen is default when it really shouldn't be. The icons used in the menu are pretty good. The windowskin used is completely lame and inappropriate. Where this area of the game is simply entirely inadequate is in the character sets and battle graphics which just do not look like what they are supposed to. Almost none of the 14 playable characters you can look at in the beginning looked anything like what they were supposed to look like--by dint of the fact that they are from the RTP which is designed for lite jfantasy. Character sets are one area of the game where just a little work and effort can provide you with a LOT of benefit.

Pseudo-Score for Present Build: 40/100

Audio: Awesome work on the soundtrack keep doing what you're doing XD.

Pseudo-Score for Present Build: 90/100

So overall if I were to review the game in its present state I would give it something like a 40/100 (2 out of 5 Stars) (not an average) at most. But I think it has the potential to be much, much better than that and I want to see it be better because it's in a genre that I love and it has admirable chutzpah and moxie.