Not all of the Beyond a Steel Sky‘s humour sticks but there are enough hits to raise a smile, especially if you snicker whenever anyone says the word “interface”. Step back and the kiosk will carry on delivering the same educational information, but it’ll be yelling it rudely at patrons. Stand between an educational kiosk and a security bot and you can drag the “aggressive” property from the robot’s speech module to the display’s speech module. The beauty of this isn’t that you use hacking to progress through the game, but that you can hack devices that serve no useful purpose. Trying to get a gate to open but don’t have the right access? Drag the “open gate” task to a nearby vending machine, ask it for a drink and the gate pops open. Some of the elements in these flowcharts can be moved around or swapped with other machines, if you can stand somewhere where all the devices are in range. Instead of having you mess about completing mini-games, your hacking tool displays a flowchart for each hackable terminal, robot or machine you come across. “Not all of the Beyond a Steel Sky‘s humour sticks but there are enough hits to raise a smile”Īt least Foster is pretty handy at hacking, even if he does have a face like a botoxed mannequin. That’s hardly a problem, but the fact that characters’ faces never match the emotions in their voices is often off-putting. The voice acting is sound, though you can easily spot actors playing multiple characters. Why? Because her face is incapable of conveying that emotion. But you wouldn’t know to look at Foster’s near deadpan expression, or the similarly emotionless NPCs.Īt one point you have to tell the man’s widow about his clandestine activities Foster notes that her face softens, as she realises he wasn’t the bore she thought he was. The game’s grand revelation is a real bombshell as is discovering the motives of the dead man you stole your system-busting ID chip from. Even though you don’t get to explore every nook and alleyway, it’s an impressive sight.īeyond aspires to be an emotional rollercoaster, and there are some moments that really deliver. A neat touch is that the most influential people live on the bottom of the city, with other residents aspiring to join them at the bottom. “ Beyond aspires to be an emotional rollercoaster, and there are some moments that really deliver”īeyond a Steel Sky has a relatively limited number of locations – perhaps 13 in the whole game – but its draw distance is sufficient that you get a real sense of the size of the city. Ten years later, when a child from his village is kidnapped and taken to Union City, he heads off in hot pursuit. At the conclusion of Beneath, Foster escaped the futuristic Union City, leaving his robot companion in charge, and went to live in the Australian bush. You don’t have to have played Beneath a Steel Sky to understand Beyond, but if you already know who Foster is, you’ll spot plenty of shoutouts to the previous game. Protagonist Robert Foster is not a man who’s prone to self-examination, even in the face of his own folly his unwavering assuredness starts to grate, to Beyond a Steel Sky’s cost. But there’s a note of arrogance running through it that reaches a crescendo as the game draws to a close. Robert Foster is always right that’s the message I was left with as Beyond a Steel Sky’s credits rolled.Ī sequel to 1994’s Beneath a Steel Sky, this third-person adventure can be funny, charming and rewarding.
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