Blade Scunner.
Nivalis, the futuristic metropolis in which the events of Cloudpunk take place, really is the heart and soul of Ion Lands’ captivating “neon noir” adventure game. A wonderfully evocative voxel art city, it immediately transports us to a future that so precisely recalls the neon-drenched storefronts, rain-soaked streets and seedy underbelly of the dystopian vision of Los Angeles we all know and love from Blade Runner. This is a world where flying cars, known here as HOVAs, zoom around in an impossibly dangerous mess of light and metal, where the clouds above the city boil and rage, enormous billboards sell desperate denizens unattainable dreams and monolithic skyscrapers stretch off in every direction.
More than any other title we’ve played in recent memory, Cloudpunk relies on its setting, on the graphical wizardry of its artists and the intricately woven atmosphere they’ve created in order to sell its story, and so it’s really a rather huge problem that this Switch port of the game — outsourced here to Merge Games, who have also handled the reportedly problematic PS4 and Xbox versions — struggles on almost every level to deliver the wonder of Nivalis intact to Nintendo’s hybrid console. This port is, in short, a bit of a mess.
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