ANNO: Mutationem

Anno Mutationem is a 2D hack and slash with 3D exploration and some RPG elements. It has a strong cyberpunk anime aesthetic clearly inspired in Neon Genesis Evangelion and Ghost In the Shell even with some homages to them here and there. The game makes great use of 2D sprites over 3D backgrounds, the pixel art is gorgeous, the textures and color palettes used are very nice and the lighting and particle effects are great. It is a very good looking game. The music is great too specially during boss fights, as it is full of pumping electronic tracks enhancing the most epic moments. Character designs are hit-or-miss, main character is okay but the villains are just ridiculous and impossible to take seriously and the side-kick character is very annoying. The atmosphere in the cities is quite strong and well done though.

The game uses 3D for exploration and 2D for combat and platforming. Cities and open spaces are typically exploration sections in which NPCs, characters and some quests or puzzles can be found, and there is no combat or platforming during these 3D sections. The 2D parts typically take place on dungeons or in closed spaces like corridors, and the game seamlessly transitions between these two modes even inside the same location. Controls are snappy and responsive during combat, there are a few short-range weapons like swords, greatswords and double-edged swords, and long-range weapons like guns or rocket launchers. There aren't many weapons, most of them being very expensive and only a few of them could be found on the wild. Combat is quick and fun but enemies can be a bit spongy. Battles combining short-ranged and long-ranged enemies in an enclosed space require some thought and there is a number of different moves and epic finishers that can be executed. Money can be collected to purchase healing items, weapons and upgrades, but it is hard to come by and there aren't good places to farm for it (if any), the player can collect and sell junk but it doesn't yield much money. There is a bartender mini-game that yields money but only on the first playthrough (and I think it gets locked after completing all its levels?). Anyway, money is hard to get and at least in my experience it is best used in getting healing items as some bosses can be quite difficult and frustrating. Healing items take a while to take effect, which increases the difficulty.

Being an RPG-like game there are some cities that can be explored plot-wise and revisited mostly at will to complete some quests, the few of them that are present in the game anyway. Most of these quests suck, devolving into fetch quests or just going from point A to point B, or being so obtuse that there is almost no sensible clue about how to solve them, like the elevator puzzle. There are good quests though that makes you pay attention and gather clues through observation but there aren't many of them. There are dungeon stages that comprise the most of the enemies and bosses of the game, with most of the latter having quite cool (but hard) battles. These dungeons are mostly underground and have a lot of corridors, and some puzzles about doors, moving platforms or levers. In terms of platforming the level design is good (with the occasional frustrating section like the red lasers) and there is some backtracking to do but overall the dungeons are a little dull in contrast to the beautiful and colorful open spaces of the cities. The last dungeon in particular drags for far too long, it is annoying to traverse and cointains huge exposition dumps that are not fun (more on that later). It also contains surprise bosses and sudden difficulty spikes. The game is fairly linear, there aren't many cities and they are quite small, so there is not a huge amount to things to do here. That's a shame because I think that was the best part of the game and I wish there were more urban stages as the dungeons take the most part of the runtime.

In terms of character progression there isn't a traditional leveling system. Instead the game features a tech-tree that can be unlocked using two different kinds of EXP points. Blue points are acquired by defeating enemies (I'm not sure if these can be farmed as enemies seldom respawn) and are used to acquire more combos for the weapons, improve the speed of shots and things like that. Red points are obtained during special story moments and are used to increase stats like health, defense or offense and such. Special traversal abilities like double jump or wall climbing are acquired story-wise at no cost. There is not enough EXP to unlock the whole tree (and I don't think grinding is viable) so skills to upgrade must be chosen carefully. Weapons can be customized with chips giving them elemental damage and such but these chips are hard to come by and very expensive to purchase, also I'm not sure about what kind of enemies are susceptible to what kind of elemental damage, but chips can be swapped between weapons so there is some experimentation to do for the players willing to do it. Hacking is an integral part of the game too as some doors must be hacked in order to gain further access, via a timing-based minigame,and hacking abilities can be improved in the tech-tree by using blue EXP in order to ease these puzzles and provide more rewards like money and EXP. There is also a fishing mini-game too, and a DLC that includes a top-down shooter dungeon-crawler mini-game based on the side-kick.

The story is about a woman that is part of a private security company or something that is looking for her missing brother, which will lead to the uncovering of some conspiracies. Honestly the story easily the weakest part of the game, it is a complete mess, it barely makes sense and it is very hard to follow due to the amount of characters and the little information we have about them. The futuristic world is explained very slowly, with big concepts like complete mechanization of living beings, parallel universes or psychic/magical powers being introduced suddenly without any explanation whatsoever, and characters coming and going out of nowhere. The dialog is terrible, characters talk in a weird and mysterious way alluding to unexplained events, almost nobody identify themselves on introduction, and there are numerous translation, spelling and grammar errors in the script. There are also weird bits of anime-like humor that clash horribly with the more serious moments of the game, the tone can change from one scene to the next without notice, and in my opinion very few of the jokes land. The worse offense in my opinion are the HUGE exposition dumps in the last part of the game, delivered by the overused and dumb trope of the censored files that the player has to find and read, having key parts of them blackened out like if they were classified reports. The game does this a lot in the final dungeon, it makes harder to understand what is going on as there are big revelations near the end, it gets tiresome quickly and it was completely unnecessary.

Despite all the negatives I mentioned I do recommend this game because it is quite fun and it looks and sounds great. I liked the 2D-3D transitions a lot and I hope more action games take that route and provide rich areas to explore. There is an interesting world here that in my opinion it needs to be unfolded and explained in a better way, but it just looks like a bunch of cool concepts mashed up and rushed out. It fell short on many of my expectations but I want to judge it for what is instead of what it isn't, and it isn't a bad game at all. I don't think there is much replay value though unless you're really invested in the story or the sidequests, or if you want to try out other weapons and combos. I can't recommend Anno Mutationem for its story, but I can recommend it for everything else.

2.5D Cyberpunk 2077 mixed with SCP and a few VA-11 Hall-A shoutouts
Deep character development.
Amazing sound track
Side Quests
Skill Trees
Weapon Upgrades
Character outfits!
List goes on!
Amazing experience, I can not recommend enough!

Plot: acceptable.
Translation errors: sometimes make the situation in the plot funny.
Content filling: secondary content is evenly distributed as the plot progresses.
Gameplay: throughout the game, there were no questions about the controls and interaction with the in-game world.
Possible disadvantages:
Not all languages ​​have the correct translation.
Among the bugs, I was unlucky to encounter a map that sometimes disappeared, which was fixed by opening and closing it completely, and markers for secondary tasks could simply disappear (careful reading of the task description may help).
Verdict: I recommend
The game is good, but unfortunately too short. Of course, I would like more.
But for those who are ready to go through all the same, there is NG+

This game is a little gem which if it got more polishing it could really shine, unfortunately the combat system and the rpg components really need some reworks to make it more enjoyable. Still I recommend it, I really enjoyed the graphic and the charas, so if you can deal with the flaws you won't regret it, though avoid the collector's edition (you can read here

One of my favs. If you like side scrolling fighting with story, upgrades, crafting, and cyberpunk theme to boot.

1) Due to it's unique design and style, the game manages to look good, yet is not demanding when it comes to system requirements. I liked the look so much that I've been giving a close look to many objects that move or have an animation as well, unfortunately, I found a few bugs (those are actually hard to spot, since they're present onto specific parts of locations and they do not affect the gameplay). Maybe, I'll do a proper report for the devs to fix those if they intend to update the game or add some extra content.
2) Combat is actually.. Well, it's actually good. It works for both casual players and sweats. You could try to do some cool, fancy combos, though it's sadly not revelant from mid to end game. At least, you can still adopt from different play-styles or even combine them all together. The flaws is that sometimes, things might not work as smooth as you'd expect.. Like perfect guard might cause some objects to get stuck mid-air or you might not get rewarded for performing one since your opponent just phases through you, lol. I know for a person that haven't played the game it might be imagined as something outright, but I'd say it's just a specific case that won't occur normally, besides, I don't want to describe things in details to avoid spoilers. I think that the devs wanted you to perform differenty from case to case, which makes it demanding for your choises. Sometimes, it puts you under conditions where one thing is more revelant over another, but all I can tell it is just that it will require some extra affect for you, that's all (short tips: build up your upgrades precisely, make sure your equipment is decent and you have consumables prepared).
3) The story? For me, I'd say it was interesting enough to have me actually read, investigate and interrogate with the world and beings within it. I wouldn't say that the story is something crazy or unique, since the game feels like it has so much room for more content to include, to show or include before the story route actually ends. At the very moment, we technically have a logic end, which means that it is most likely there won't be a continuation (but we got a a short F2P DLC, so I still have some hopes for a sequel). Even though that the story might not get any further for the main character, I am pretty sure that the game could have some major DLCs with brand new locations, a lot of quests and the story that could feel whatever the gaps main story line didn't fill. There, we could play as some other characters, since their story haven't reached it's end yet (won't mention any of them due to spoilers).
4. The in-game content, it has issues.. Well, on the beggining, it is enough to open a map and check the available locations. I immidiately felt like it's too small, but I've seen some interractable NPCs and objects that you can't access on the very beginning (plot based), I also thought that there would be a decent amount of activities to do. Once you'll unlock most of the locations and do some quests, you'll realize that the end for the story is not as far as it feels in the beginning. I really was afraid that I'll finish the game too soon, so I focused onto other activities and even received all achievements during the process.
5. Overal, the game is actually interesting and fun, provides decent amount of content and activities along with a story that'll make you curious till it's end. Of course, that all including it's price tag, since it has up to 50% discounts from time to time, which makes the game pretty much cheap and accessable for the people that don't have much money to spent for gaming (prince and it's accessability depends onto the regions, so can't say so for sure).
P.S. - There is so much to come from, that I am looking forward for an extra content to be added within the game, such as DLCs. I also expect to see a sequel.

It is the art style of this game which piqued my interest initially, plus the side-scrolling action game-play seemed fluid. Having been on a Blade Runner kick this year, the general aesthetic of ANNO: Mutationem further scratches that itch with beautiful pixel art, marrying 2-D and 3-D design. The music as well is very well done. The story is there. It's not bad, but toward the end I was ready to wrap it up. Then again, my play time did bloat from a bit of needless grinding for Grombitz, which are a "currency" used to unlock abilities on the Skill Tree. A note for players: The game will alert you to its "point of no return"; save any grinding you wish to do for then and thus save yourself time.
One area in which this game falls short for me is its English localization having more grammatical and spelling errors—even whole words missing—than I care to document. It can be distracting at times, especially when the subtitles and spoken dialogue might not match. There were two instances my game "froze" after saving my progress. It wasn't actually unresponsive, as it would still recognize when I would unplug my Nintendo Switch pro controller and plug it back in; however, the second time it happened I had to close the game and reboot. This next bit isn't a critique, but a side note that I kept wanting to roll even in 3-D areas to get around faster and couldn't. And I can't tell if I'm just bad at combat or if there's a slight latency between pressing the button to defend and the shield coming out. There were more than a few times I failed to parry attacks for that reason.
I also tried the Mysterious Game Console DLC and stopped after reaching Floor 1-2. It's not bad! But it is different, and I'm not so good at these types of Rogue-like mechanics, least of all when the player character can only face one direction.
All in all, I got about what I expected from the game.