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“It’s easy to make a slick looking sci-fi game with shiny surfaces on specular maps.

#MECHAJAMMER REVIEWS MOVIE#

“We tried a lot of art styles but we really wanted that grit, that sweaty ‘70s, ‘80s movie where they don't have a lot of makeup on and everybody's messy,” Joseph says.

In fact, the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive from one another - when it comes to cyberpunk, aesthetic is one of the most powerful thematic modes you can work with. While these films had a clear impact on Mechajammer’s aesthetic, the game is also designed around similar themes. Still, Mechajammer’s main influences consist of movies like the aforementioned RoboCop, Escape from New York, Total Recall, Blade Runner, and Terminator. The biggest goal for us in a game like this is letting the player know what they have available, what's going to happen, and then letting them run loose with that knowledge.” Joseph cites Daggerfall as an example of this kind of design because the world was built around the player, as opposed to vice versa.

You go through apartment buildings and you're like, ‘Alright, that's the building.’ We wanted to build that whole system into this - giving the player less direction allows them to create their own stories.

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And it was like, ‘Oh, this is stupid.’ But it was great, because then you get to figure out how to navigate around yourself. It was like an overhead shot from a drone, or a picture of the front of a building. “I'm in my 30s at this point, but I miss that in games. “Not holding the player's hand is something we're not seeing a lot of ,” Joseph says. However, it is also extremely interested in games, particularly older ones like Deus Ex and the early Elder Scrolls titles, hearkening back to Joseph and Hannah’s shared love for tabletop-inspired experiences like Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate. Speaking of RoboCop, Mechajammer takes massive inspiration from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 classic. It's just like, ‘Oh, no, what’s happening? I feel like I'm watching RoboCop from my window.’” There'd be people in tents outside of it. It's like Jeff Bezos creating his giant jungle domes in downtown Seattle. It's a fun backdrop being in that shadow of the high, glossy syndicates that you're always surrounded by. “It's a pretty simple concept, but you're surrounded by other people that are also stuck. “You're stuck on this colony, you're these misfits in society, and you're trying to get out,” Joseph says. It's a fascinating concept we're already beginning to in 2021.” People that now are the capitalists going into space obviously detach themselves from Earth, that causes a big strike. “But the whole idea is there's a collective government on Earth, and off in the colonies we've established all over the galaxy, there was a rebellion. “We don't really nail down a time period for when this takes place in the future, we keep that vague,” Joseph says. It’s this very distance that makes it so resonant. Instead of science fiction spectacle like Mass Effect and similar games, with hover cars and skyscrapers and intergalactic councils, the events of Mechajammer transpire across slums, swamps, and jungles in a war-ravaged ex-mining colony. Whalenought specifically decided to juxtapose cyberpunk-esque digital cybernetics with more of a low-life, analogue world. As opposed to the typical sci-fi sheen we see in a lot of contemporary video games, it is sweaty, gritty, and extremely dirty. Mechajammer is unique beyond this, though.

Mechajammer reviews