Another Italian-made game with a hooded hacker protagonist in a neon hologram cyberpunk dystopia and 80s nostalgia, and they were released mere months apart. Strange string of coincidences, but at least Cyberverse had some merit to it.
Made by ex-Ubisoft Milan employees, Foreclosed on the other hand is everything wrong with low rent indie action games where the developers want to have a ton of action but have no real idea on how to program AI able to do anything other than standing and shooting.
That's this three hour game in a nutshell: enemies come out, with you seeing them through walls, they stand motionless out in the open and keep shooting at you, occasionally reloading. You pop out of cover, shoot each one once in the head and move on. Sometimes they wear helmets, which means you have to shoot them more than once in the head.
You are given a number of gun upgrades and powers, which you unlock with perk points obtained by killing waves of enemies and finding hidden collectibles: making enemies float Mass Effect style, shielding yourself, making enemies explode (not as cool as that sounds), grab and throw a selected few props via a woefully underutilized telekinesis mechanic, or hack certain exploding elements of the scenery, but the combat encouters are so incredibly easy and you so over equipped for them that you will hardly need to do any of the above other than out of sheer boredom. There are no difficulty settings either, so that's all you get.
The telekinesis-stealth-shooting element makes this somewhat reminiscent of the original xbox game Psy Ops, but nowhere near as good.
It alternates the fighting with the most basic sneaking sections imaginable, in which you hide from drones going back and forth and perform stealth takedowns by overloading people's neural implants (with their screams somehow not alerting anyone around them) and leave bodies lying around, which makes no differences since enemy patrol routes never cross. Sometimes these sections are from an isometric perspective, meaning you end up not knowing what you can hide behind or not.
Puzzles exist but are the most garden variety tripe possible (move the two containers!), but mercifully, no Pipemania, though it does have the "match the two wavy lines!" puzzle from Batman.
It reminded me of the old 360 game Matt Hazard, which was so preoccupied with delivering its humor that it forgot to have fun gameplay. No humor in Foreclosed, so all we are left with is its poorly conveyed narrative about something something blockchains, something something corporations, which is difficult to care about, given how much of a blank slate the gruff douchebag protagonist is, making it impossible to relate to him or his predicament.
There is something good in the world building, with a cool idea regarding state-owned cyber implants installed into humans at birth, plunging everyone into crippling automatic debt to repay them, but there is simply not enough time to explore any of it, despite half the game being composed of verbose, poorly acted expository cutscenes.
The game doesn't even have an ending: you get a choice of which 10 second clip to watch and credits roll just when something was finally happening and things were starting to get interesting.
The XIII-inspired cel shaded aesthetics are pleasing, and the game tries to do something neat with the comic book panels split screens and gunfire onomatopoeia appearing when you shoot, but ultimately that ends up getting in the way more than anything else.
More time in the oven to at the very least make the enemies take cover during combat could have given this game some depth, but as it is, there is simply nothing there to recommend it to anyone, unless you have to play every single cyberpunk-themed game ever made.
Made by ex-Ubisoft Milan employees, Foreclosed on the other hand is everything wrong with low rent indie action games where the developers want to have a ton of action but have no real idea on how to program AI able to do anything other than standing and shooting.
That's this three hour game in a nutshell: enemies come out, with you seeing them through walls, they stand motionless out in the open and keep shooting at you, occasionally reloading. You pop out of cover, shoot each one once in the head and move on. Sometimes they wear helmets, which means you have to shoot them more than once in the head.
You are given a number of gun upgrades and powers, which you unlock with perk points obtained by killing waves of enemies and finding hidden collectibles: making enemies float Mass Effect style, shielding yourself, making enemies explode (not as cool as that sounds), grab and throw a selected few props via a woefully underutilized telekinesis mechanic, or hack certain exploding elements of the scenery, but the combat encouters are so incredibly easy and you so over equipped for them that you will hardly need to do any of the above other than out of sheer boredom. There are no difficulty settings either, so that's all you get.
The telekinesis-stealth-shooting element makes this somewhat reminiscent of the original xbox game Psy Ops, but nowhere near as good.
It alternates the fighting with the most basic sneaking sections imaginable, in which you hide from drones going back and forth and perform stealth takedowns by overloading people's neural implants (with their screams somehow not alerting anyone around them) and leave bodies lying around, which makes no differences since enemy patrol routes never cross. Sometimes these sections are from an isometric perspective, meaning you end up not knowing what you can hide behind or not.
Puzzles exist but are the most garden variety tripe possible (move the two containers!), but mercifully, no Pipemania, though it does have the "match the two wavy lines!" puzzle from Batman.
It reminded me of the old 360 game Matt Hazard, which was so preoccupied with delivering its humor that it forgot to have fun gameplay. No humor in Foreclosed, so all we are left with is its poorly conveyed narrative about something something blockchains, something something corporations, which is difficult to care about, given how much of a blank slate the gruff douchebag protagonist is, making it impossible to relate to him or his predicament.
There is something good in the world building, with a cool idea regarding state-owned cyber implants installed into humans at birth, plunging everyone into crippling automatic debt to repay them, but there is simply not enough time to explore any of it, despite half the game being composed of verbose, poorly acted expository cutscenes.
The game doesn't even have an ending: you get a choice of which 10 second clip to watch and credits roll just when something was finally happening and things were starting to get interesting.
The XIII-inspired cel shaded aesthetics are pleasing, and the game tries to do something neat with the comic book panels split screens and gunfire onomatopoeia appearing when you shoot, but ultimately that ends up getting in the way more than anything else.
More time in the oven to at the very least make the enemies take cover during combat could have given this game some depth, but as it is, there is simply nothing there to recommend it to anyone, unless you have to play every single cyberpunk-themed game ever made.