The Technomancer

“You, who has witnessed the secret with your own eyes, who, in your heart, knows the knowledge that he bears is true… and has understood that this knowledge could cast our kind into an endless pit of despair...”
The timelines of Mars: War Logs and The Technomancer wrap around each other. This game begins some time before Mars, and ends after its resolution. This dynamism offers the player a new way to experience the hostile existentialism of the Red Planet, and its inhabitants, the struggling, forgotten children of Earth. Among the elites of humanity’s diaspora are the technomancers, a group of super soldiers whose ranks we join as lieutenant Zachariah Mancer. His induction is hounded by Colonel Viktor Watcher, the ruthless authoritarian leader of Abundance’s military state, who believes that the secrets of the cloistered technomancers are the font of everlasting power on Mars.
The Technomancer assumes a high political tone, but never comes off as preachy; instead, it encourages us to think about our own convictions and place in the world. In sharp contrast to the faceless ecclesiastical tyranny of Aurora that we see in Mars, Zach’s saga confronts the propaganda of a recognizable regime. Aurora’s virtue names are replaced by a codified set of professional surnames, representative of the rigid caste system under which Abundance’s society groans. We follow Zach across Mars’ cities and through its ravaged shadow paths on his sacred duty as a technomancer: to preserve the secret, and reestablish contact with the Earth, to return the intergalactic exodus back to its roots. This story of humanity’s perpetual struggle with itself is told through four schools of fast-paced, reactive, and powerful combat, spanning a vivid, surviving, devastated planet whose populace dares to hope for a better future.
TL;DR?
It is truly a struggle to articulate the beauty of this game without spoilers, but I owe it to everyone who reads this to let them discover everything on their own. Spiders’ Mars saga doesn’t neatly fit into any genre delineations – it is sci-fi, political horror, post-apocalyptic, and fantastical, all at once – and this diversity does it many favours. The Technomancer is, first and foremost, a roleplaying game, and navigating the finer elements of that genre in such a beautiful muddle is a unique experience.

PROS
+ Predictably – the characters. Many mainstream, modern games lean heavily on the action aspect, to keep the player excited and engaged. Spiders’ games, however, acknowledge the importance of the character drama. It is hard to get someone to care about the piece of media they are consuming if they are not connected or engaged with the protagonist and their friends. While the overarching narrative of The Technomancer is much larger than Zach himself, we only care about it because we care about Zach and his companions. It is this humanizing impulse that runs through all of Spiders’ games that make them so endearing.
+ The story is a strong assessment of power, humanity, and all its subsequent trappings.
+ Easily has the best combat of Spiders’ generational run of RPGs. The staff is unbelievably fun to play with, and its animations are satisfying and beautiful. You feel its every hit as Zach gracefully pirouettes with it. The nail gun and dagger are satisfying and fluid, and the animation for the Guardian’s shield unfurling scratches my brain.
+ Every class – Warrior, Rogue, Guardian, and of course Technomancer – plays and handles differently. You can swap between the melee classes with a quick keystroke, and use your technomancy in any stance.
+ Reactive combat.
+ The crafting system. Being able to see each modification and understand how it benefits you in the game has always been a hallmark of Spiders, and it is in The Technomancer where this truly comes into its own.
+ Your choices actually matter. Your companions remember what you say and what you do, and you can lose them, befriend them, or fall in love with them(!). It’s up to you.
+ An atmospheric masterpiece; environmental storytelling takes the starring role as you navigate abandoned colonial ruins, discover desiccated corpses, and scavenge supplies, and the engaging electric-yet-rustic soundtrack is by none other than the Olivier Derivière.
+ Iconic Spiders monster design.
+ Satisfying exploration.
+ The karma system is intriguing. You can fall victim to your want for serum – water, currency – but at the cost of human life… and it will affect your path.
CONS
- It can refuse to run on certain multicore computers. I have an i7 processor and never had an issue, yet other people couldn’t get it to stay open.
- Similar to Spiders’ other works, the camera can be a bit finicky at times when you lock onto an enemy, especially in a confined area.
- Cameras in dialogues are likewise awkwardly placed – we are close to Zach, but his companions are metres away, yet sound like they’re right by his side.
- While the combat in The Technomancer is the most approachable of all their games, it is also the most luck-oriented, especially on higher difficulties; you can handily deal with some groups of enemies, while other groups of those same enemies will bum-rush you and force you to reload.
- Act 1, while important for establishing the story and introducing us to Zach and his circumstances, feels a little protracted compared to the other acts.
- The penultimate boss is underwhelming, from both a game-play and story standpoint.
Reflections
After I finished The Technomancer for the first time, it haunted me. The horror of being stranded so far from aid, at the mercy of megalomaniac corporations whose currency is water and secrets, unlocked some sort of primal unease deep within me. Even those characters whose loyalties splintered from the corporations only served themselves and their own interests. While I personally find the gameplay of every Spiders installment to be great, the story and its dramatis personae are what I always tend to remember the most.
Zachariah is a sharp contrast to Roy. Instead of a renegade, we are a young officer, struggling to find our role on the seismic political stage of Abundance. We approach this world not through the point of view of a jaded POW, but through the fresh eyes of a cadet, who is discovering the rot and ruin of his childhood home in real time. Experiencing this disenchantment with Zach, rather than inheriting it as we do with Roy, we are privileged to see another side of Martian society. This is in no way a denunciation of Roy’s story and character, but rather a testament to the dynamism of Spiders’ storytelling. The overlapping of Roy’s journey and Zachariah’s struggle offer a better understanding of the lay of the land. That Zach is impacted by choices that Roy made thrusts us into an environment that is living and unforgiving. The flora and fauna of the rolling Martian wastelands may be alien to our eyes, yet the underpinnings of the perpetual struggle for power and our morally cannibalistic impulses is laid bare. This game is fast-paced. engaging, and an unforgettable journey that serves to reflect on the realities of human nature. In sharing Zach’s disillusionment, we are encouraged to think about our own beliefs, and how we would navigate injustice and hopelessness while trapped in a cage. The themes and ideas that undergird The Technomancer are close enough to our own reality to remain confronting.
Final Verdict
Overall Rating ★★★★★
Story ★★★★★
Gameplay ★★★★★
Graphics ★★★★★
Sound Design ★★★★★
Replay Value ★★★★☆
Difficulty ★★★★☆
PC Requirements ★★★☆☆
Game Length ★★★★★
Visit Damsel Direct for more gunpowder, magic, and chaos.

People expect that every game like this should be as good as ;
- Witcher 3
- Mass Effect 2
- Uncharted 2

For the sake of comparison....the games I mentioned are like a Michelin star gourmet meal.
And this game here is like a fat juicy burger with fries and a can of Coke.
Not the best in the world....but still very juicy and delicious if you're not an elite customer i guess.
It took me 36 hours to finish and sometime in the future I'm going to replay it for the sake of seeing different endings.
Give it a few hours to grow onto you and you will have an experience to remember.

"Amazing game."
When I started playing, I couldn't understand why the reviews were average. After all, compared to Mars: War Logs, they made progress. The graphics have become much better, the maps are bigger, the RPG system has also improved, the dialogues are good, the world has quite realistic oddities, the rejection of mutants, the army's attempts to become a single force, the rebels, etc.
But the more I played, the more I understood the problem with the average ratings. It's simple, the developers improved the good parts of Mars: War Logs and made the bad ones worse. Do you remember how in Mars: War Logs they made you run 10+ times around one location? Just hand in a couple of quests, get new ones and run around the same locations again. So, now the size of the locations is bigger, the main first location for example has 3 levels and when you get to the 2nd act, then the runs from the lower to the upper level begin, and in some places you also need to use the correct entrance, because the location changes and some places become even more difficult to access. Remember how the enemies were constantly regenerating? Everything is the same here, and by the 3rd act they become stronger and can kill the main character in literally 4-5 hits.
The combat system here is terrible, when the enemies start to dodge, they can do it 3 times in a row, after which they hit. And it is sometimes difficult to quickly deal with the enemies + the enemies can attack all at once, how does it look? The big guy puts you on the floor, a couple more guys shoot and by the time I get up, I get the final blow, from 100% HP to 0 in 1-2 seconds. And all this does not create difficulty, it is annoying. After the 2nd act I wanted to finish the game as soon as possible, because there was no particular interest in the development of the plot, and the fights were annoying.
I don’t know about the keyboard/mouse, but on the gamepad the developers put dodge on the same button as skipping dialogue, as a result, a bunch of scenes were missed. The transition to the location is on the same button as a quick strike, as a result, constantly getting out a weapon when you unsuccessfully approached the transition place. Many places where you could just run past enemies have doors or ledges, until you defeat the enemies, you will not pass.
Rating the game is no more than 3/5.

The Technomancer is a hard game to recommend. Overall I like it and have quite a soft spot for it, but boy is it something that is very much greater than the sum of it’s parts, and you must have a high tolerance for jank. This follows the pattern for a lot of other Spiders games that I have played, such as Of Orcs and Men, Bound by Flame and Mars War Logs, ambitious with interesting writing, but janky with a low budget.

Overall it’s an action RPG on a post apocalypse Mars, cut off from earth, with weird mutant animals running around, cities, corporations and mutants rising from the ashes and fighting for power, and the middle of it all, Technomancers, who are basically electromages, stuck in the middle. It’s set in sort of parallel to the game Mars: War Logs, in the same universe.

Unfortunately the list of defects and irritations is long. Starting the game is a challenge, it doesn’t like multicore CPUs, despite being less than 10 years old. Fortunately there is a guide on steam to fix this and get it running,

It generally ran ok with minimal crashes, except once when it crashed to desktop and refused to start again at all. In this case installing new drivers helped.

While it runs, and I could get between 80 to 120fps, generally the latter, in most areas at 4k, it seems to have a weird janky stuttering despite the stated FPS that is often present and isn’t fun.

Graphically it can actually look quite nice, particularly in the later game, but this is restricted early on because it sets the game in a dingy, grey and very dark city.

Combat is floaty and not great. Fortunately I was able to craft a high damage dagger and cheese my way through most of the game, so mostly it’s just ‘there.’ The lack of impact isn’t helped that despite the fact this is a mature game with swearing, there’s no blood, in fact even though you are fighting enemies with large daggers, hammers, axes and guns, they just get ‘knocked out.’ This ties into the idea of a moral choice, you can harvest and then kill them for ‘serum’ the currency and a resource for health kits. However I always had enough serum from looting equipment and selling, you don’t get much and you lose karma in the game’s morality system, so it’s not worth engaging with it. There’s also a large ludo narrative dissonance that you aren’t killing these people after whacking them over the head with a big hammer.

There’s a pointless stealth system, the game often forces you to run back and forth between characters for quests through large labyrinthine maps, past enemies that respawn and you are often required to fight. The loots is not that interesting, the facial animation is serviceable at best, no one looks stupid but no one shows much emotion either. The game lacks scale, yes it’s not got the budget for it, but by the end of the game you start to notice it. For example in one quest you build an alliance to topple an opponent from a key political position. I expected a dramatic sequence where the villain was confronted in a political assembly, and all the alliances you have built support you, something akin to sequences in games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Instead having completed the quest you get a ten second cutscene of the villain getting yelled at, and that’s it. You are told he’s been removed, but it has no impact on the game.

In the middle of this I picked up a Mass Effect 3 modded playthrough that I had dropped a while ago due to mods being broken. I finally fixed it, and wow the difference is night and day. The scale, the pacing and the overall moment to moment gameplay are light years apart.

And yet despite all this, I really like the atmosphere and much of the surrounding story of the game. The voice acting and characters are serviceable, nothing irritating but not much really stands out as super memorable. But something clicked for me with the setting of the game and the overall arc. I love scifi tropes like lost colonies fighting to survive, and this has it in spades. The overall elements aren’t that original, but combined they make into a flavour that I feel stands out from many other games. 30 hours in I found myself just drinking in the atmosphere of a hidden mutant city in the valleys of Mars.

The writing overall can be quite smart, with you caught in the middle as a soldier stuck serving a city that is becoming totalitarian with s secret police, but the game doesn’t resort to cliches, opponents are often themselves morally murky as well. The game tries to integrate choices into the game, and although they don’t have a massive impact, it’s interesting to see how things play out. The ending is a little muted, the lack of budget affects the game as mentioned, as there’s no real epic final battle. Bottom line is I have a soft spot for story lead games that try and do something interesting, even if it is a bit amateurish, as long as it doesn’t grate too much, and this is very much it.

Overall this is not a game to pick up if you are expecting a high quality rpg, and you have to have a high tolerance for jank. If you have that and you are interested in something a little bit interesting, you might find something worth looking at there, just be aware it takes a lot of perseverance.

It’s a great game, honestly a solid 7.5/10, but it nosedives to a 6/10 purely because of the absurd, soul-crushing amount of backtracking. You go to a place, do a quest, come back... but wait! Plot twist, you have to go right back to the same place because now the second part of the quest magically unlocked. And then? Back again. And again. And again. I've played games with backtracking before, but this? Hell.

I’m not even exaggerating when I say this level of backtracking should be considered a war crime. Like, there should be a UN resolution against it. It’s not just gameplay, it’s psychological warfare. This is cyber torture in quest form.

Apart from that, it’s genuinely good, with a strong story and very interesting companions. The combat is decent, but since your HP is hard-locked at 150, you can literally take only two hits before dying. The game is unforgiving and unfair. While the combat itself is solid, its clunkiness, combined with the HP cap, makes the late game frustrating.

So, just a suggestion: don’t play it on Extreme difficulty like I did (for the achievements). Just play it on Normal. Even then, it’ll still be very hard, but at least it’ll be bearable.

All of these issues are why a genuinely great game ends up feeling just average. That said, it's still absolutely worth playing for the story alone. Oh, and yeah, the main character's voice acting is pretty bad, but everyone else does a solid job, so don’t let that turn you off.

I played this game after playing Greedfall - expecting it to be a lesser older creation. Except it was so much more than that. You can see a lot of the gameplay elements (e.g the hilarious 1st boss that is going to kill you because you are trash XD) that you see in Greedfall. The story is great, the npcs are awesome and the voice acting is fantastic. Plenty of dialogue + cutscenes with engaging dialogue that seamlessly allows you to engage with the characters and the world. The combat is also fun - esp when you get the big technomancer spells.
Personally I feel a lot of the combat complaints re its jankiness is reflected again in Greedfall - but its actually something that adds to the challenge of the game - and it doesn't take long to master and for it to become actually super fun and very rewarding when you kill a boss. Which by the end is super ez so I am looking forward to playing this with a different build (and all the builds look super cool - you can play with guns, be a spinning monk etc) and maxxing the difficulty. Regardless - the actual technomancer spells look awesome - as well as the slo motion of the crits.
I would also add that the game doesn't shy away from dark storylines (no spoilers but some of the companion stories are like pretty grim) and they drop more f-bombs in one sentence than i would do in a single day XD. Someone give these guys some more budget to make games because this is clearly a labour of love.
Finally - there is some sussy point system about karma - no spoilers - but I intend on finding out what happens when you go crazy with that O.O
Si l'eau pouvait éteindre un brasier amoureux,
Ton amour qui me brûle est si fort douloureux,
Que j'eusse éteint son feu de la mer de mes larmes.

The Technomancer is a decidedly average RPG, but a masterclass in storytelling and worldbuilding
I think a lot of the negativity surrounding this game comes from how it presents itself to a newcomer. To put it simply, The Technomancer is a narrative-driven RPG that is trying to be an ARPG.
The gameplay is... alright. If you go into this expecting polished, AAA game-level gameplay, you are setting yourself up to fail, though it's satisfying enough once you get used to it, especially after a few upgrades. Where I think it lacks is that there just isn't enough to the gameplay to call this an ARPG, so anyone going into this expecting as much is going to be disappointed from the get-go.
That, and the difficulty settings are very unbalanced. There are four options, easy, medium, hard, and extreme. However, these 'difficulties' don't change much about the gameplay other than giving everything more health and making everything do more damage, which combined with the frankly insane respawn rates of the enemies makes higher difficulty levels very frustrating and monotonous (if you try this game, I beg you, swallow your pride and play it on easy, you will find it much more enjoyable). So basically, what I'm saying is as an ARPG, The Technomancer is a decidedly mediocre game.
However
There are few games I can honestly say have topped The Technomancer in terms of writing and storytelling for me. Each place you encounter has its own distinct culture, laws, history; each character you meet is so brilliantly developed and purposeful, it's hard not to find even the most hateable just a little endearing.
As a sequel to Mars: War Logs, you will find a huge expansion on the already rich lore that came from that game, with references that are plot-relevant and not just shameless throwbacks to its predecessor. The timeline of this game coincides with the events of MWL, and piecing together the timeline of the two games, and the events happening on opposite sides of a war, are as much of a joy as they are a challenge. As a standalone, you are introduced to the world of The Technomancer in a way that feels so perfectly natural despite the vast amount of storytelling the game throws at you right from the very start. It works well enough as a standalone that I didn't even realise it was a sequel until I finished my first playthrough (though I also recommend the prequel).
Admittedly, the dialogue and voice acting is rough (though rarely bad enough to be immersion-breaking) at times, which I imagine is a product of a combination of patchy translation, disjointed voice directing and a limited budget. However, the impactful scenes Spiders is so well-known for are as present and gut-punching as ever, and you will be caught off-guard a number of times by some hilarious one-liners.
The narrative of this game is beyond immersive. Rarely are you told anything outright; instead, you are made to draw your own conclusions, through subtext, conflicting stories, and worldbuilding that is constantly drip-fed to you from the first to the last second. If you enjoy a complex and thought-provoking story that requires reflection, nuance, and a bit of problem solving, then I could not recommend this game enough.
For all of its negative points, I think that The Technomancer is a joy to play, and is easily one of my favourite games of all time. I would encourage anyone who enjoys a good story to grab this game on sale, persevere with the gameplay, and just try throwing yourself into the story of Zachariah Mancer, it really is worth it.