ANNO: Mutationem

Beauty is only skin deep

Why

Why Not

Impressions

"Frustration". If I had to choose one word to describe ANNO: Mutationem, that'd be the one. ANNO gracefully delivers a stunningly rendered cyberpunk world packed with cool character designs and fluid combat, then falls flat on its face the second it opens its mouth.

I'll start with the positives, including some surprises I didn't expect from this style of game. The main draw is definitely the presentation, pixel art characters over a 3D, neon-drenched backdrop works so well for a Cyberpunk setting. The amount of effort put into this aspect of the game is ridiculous; backdrops are detailed and the number of distinct, cool looking filler NPCs is mildly ridiculous. There're also a few cameos; I was delighted when the bartending minigame lead to me meeting a certain other cyberpunk bartender and her boss. There's a lot of pop-culture influence here as well, the main antagonists being a mix of the SCP Foundation and SEELE from Evangelion (mostly in terms of iconography) is freshest in my mind, but there're referential posters, dialogue and characters scattered throughout.

To avoid the confusion of controlling a 2D sprite in 3D space, during exploration you can move in the Z-axis but can't jump, while in combat you're limited to the movement of a side-scroller. The combat is another strong point; as full of systems as the world is full of unique NPCs but somehow pulling it off. You can parry, block, use heavy/light/melee attack combos, shoot enemies with 3 different gun types, juggle them in the air, break their stance then use a finisher move, transform into an unkillable monster, deflect projectiles like a jedi and use your iframe dash to break enemies ankles. If I had a complaint it's that 90% of the enemies in the game require absolutely none of this, you can just mash attack at them & occasionally dodge to win encounters with no damage taken. This has the knock-on effect of making the (often pretty creative) bosses feel much harder than they are, as they sometimes require you to actually use some of these mechanics or do something creative like bait projectiles from one enemy in a group fight into hitting the others.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the level design at times; sure there're a lot of blank corridors with enemies to fight but there's also a surprising number of Dark Souls style shortcuts to unlock which'll allow you to loop back to a 'bonfire'. The side quests I tried may have just been 'go talk to person X' or fetch thing 'Y', but some of them at least had memorable endings (like unmasking the identity of a popular idol). Exploration is definitely rewarded as well, there's endless junk to pick up and a lot of it provides even more pop culture references if you read the item descriptions. This deluge of loot kinda leads into one of my criticisms of the game though; there's just way too much stuff.

While there's certainly a lot of loot, none of it feels meaningful. There's so much that you'll end up just hitting 'take all' every time you open a container without even looking, because there's too much different stuff to keep track of. It doesn't help that junk is literally junk other than their fun item descriptions, selling for nothing, and components require another opaque disassembly step to become anything you can craft weapons with. You need a whole bunch of components to craft anything, and when you pick stuff up there's no way of knowing if it's what you need or not because there's no relationship between what you pick up and what you see on the crafting screen. It would've been much better to tone the amount of loot down and instead make the stuff you find actually meaningful, something a lot of other games already figured out. The same issue of quantity over quality applies to the dialogue, but isn't its biggest issue.

At the beginning of the game I stopped to listen in on every conversation & talk to everyone; there were enough hints of personality and humour that I thought it'd probably be worth it. Unfortunately by mid-game I was ignoring NPCs and mashing 'A' through every required conversation, and by late game I skipped a lot of cutscenes altogether. I'm gonna assume it's partly a localization issue because those hints of personality and humour do make occasional appearances; maybe in the original Chinese it's way better. But I suspect the sheer quantity of NPC dialogue, conversations you can overhear, cutscenes and story dialogue just mean they couldn't come up with enough interesting/coherent things for characters to say. Speaking of coherence; the story does not have it.

You start off pretty well; mysterious illness, hacker sidekick, missing brother in trouble with a gang. But the writers made the unique choice of leaving you more and more bewildered as the story progresses, right up until the end. Characters make absolutely nonsensical choices, overreact to tiny things or don't react at all to major reveals and the cutscenes meant to reveal what's happening behind the scenes are just used for cringy aura farming. I'll give you a few of the more egregious examples of stuff that makes no sense:

Last and definitely least, the final choice. A member of the organisation who has kidnapped your brother and your best friend, spent the whole game trying to alternately murder, manipulate and control you and is just generally presented as being ultra-shady offers you a totally trustworthy bracelet to suppress your powers, telling you they won't let you leave. Mind you, this is immediately after you dispatched an interdimensional monster they had no hope against, so threatening you is once again hilarious. If you make the only rational choice, resisting and escaping with your brother, he decides to charge ahead of his godlike sister and get shot (which she somehow doesn't stop), leading to you going crazy and the world ending. To get the good ending, where everything is sunshine and rainbows, you need to take the control bracelet and trust that the MAIN ANTAGONISTS OF THE GAME will do as they promise and 'hopefully' let you go live a normal life.

I really wanted to like ANNO: Mutationem, and the combat/visuals did get me through to the end, but man the story made it a slog. My suspension of disbelief had only just recovered from the final season of Stranger Things, and now it's absolutely in tatters. Despite that I actually recommend this game with one caveat, which might be difficult to believe after the last few paragraphs. Just pretend the game doesn't have a plot; skip all the dialogue you can if you care about story and enjoy the creative combat/beautiful scenery that makes this game worthwhile. Probably wait for a sale though, the full price for a game with no story is a bit much. I really wanted to like this, and I hope the devs make a similar game with a competent English translation & writer whose previous experience isn't bad fan fiction.