Also you'll frequently throw other weapons by accident, forgetting what attack mode you were in. If you use throwing weapons, a sorely under-represented option in most games, you'll soon realise two things: that your character doesn't automatically lead her shots, and that you'll have to painstakingly pick up every tiny knife again one by one. If you use one of the half a dozen melee options like flails or polearms, your starting weapon will soon break and it'll be hours before you find another, or a repair kit - which I'm not sure actually exist. If you use guns you will do little damage, miss most shots, and find several bullets.

My excitement at the many weapon skills was gone by the third restart. Exploration is real-time but when a hostile sees you, time pauses and only moves when you take action. Much like Fates Of Ort, a better game, Mechajammer's combat mode only moves when you do. And here's where you learn how fiddly and buggy the combat is, because there's no way to avoid it. Another computer in one of the brown rooms will want a password, so you'll wander round some more, sometimes being attacked by some angry gangsters. In this new area you'll blunder around some brown alleys, through crowds of homeless people in brown clothes. You could try hacking the computer, but it probably won't work. The second thing you'll do is circle this brown area over and over until by sheer chance you happen to stand in the empty corner of the brown room where the computer is, and some text pops up to tell you the login you need to clear the path ahead. Mechajammer has a glitch problem, particularly around loading the game, conversations, and opening your inventory. I've had one leap out of a locker to attack me, which also somehow made it impossible to move away from the locker, forcing yet another glitchy reload, thus more rats. Not only are they prone to jumping you the instant you enter a room, they'll sometimes detect you through a wall and run out of a building (locking the door behind them) to chase you down the street.

Which raises the question of why they're here. The rats in Mechajammer are no threat at all and die at the slightest touch. Whalenought Studios have, to their credit, improved on Serpent In The Staglands, their game in which you can be beaten to death by a fox. Please, please, please stop making us fight fucking rats. As someone whose first day at a job once included killing a rat with a pipe, I am begging any game developers reading to trust me on this: fighting rats is not difficult, interesting, or remotely rewarding. Almost any time you find an unopened door, the answer to 'what's in here?' will be 'nothing' or 'rats'. In practice, the first thing you do is blunder around a brown area punching rats. In theory, and its trailers, and even in an earlier demo, Mechajammer is a stylish, complex, intriguingly messy cyberpunk RPG with a chaotic retro look. By my third restart I'd abandoned all interest in playing any character I wanted, and started trying to estimate whatever would get this over with sooner. When the first few dilemmas you face in an RPG aren't ethical or character ones, but about whether it would be more tedious to continue with this character or to play through the introduction again, you know there's a problem.

A second would be the sounds Joe Pesci makes in Home Alone. If I had to describe Mechajammer in a word, that word would be 'brown'. Mechajammer review: a broken, brown disaster

Mechajammer reviews