Glitchpunk

I went in genuinely rooting for Glitchpunk. Dark Lord spent over three years in Early Access polishing a love letter to old-school top-down crime sandboxes, and there is something quietly admirable about a small studio swinging that hard at a genre most of the industry abandoned in 2001. The setup is charming in a grimy way: you are an android whose programming has glitched out, leaving you free to take mercenary contracts from gangs, cults, and corporations across four cities, including New Baltia and Outpost Texas, each with its own flavour of neon-soaked decay. The world has a genuinely moody aesthetic - neon lighting, gritty district design, and an in-game radio packed with futuristic beats and absurdist commercials that lands somewhere between GTA 3's radio satire and a B-movie fever dream. When the atmosphere clicks, it really does click. On the mechanical side, Glitchpunk is exactly what it says on the tin: run, shoot, steal cars, and hack. The hacking is the most interesting wrinkle here. As an android you can override NPC minds, triggering overkill states that send bystanders into combat frenzies - genuinely useful when police escalation kicks in. And the wanted system cranks up to ten stars, which means late-game chases can spiral into beautiful chaos. Weapons are bought at vending machines scattered across the map or looted off downed enemies, and a light RPG layer lets you upgrade parameters over time. None of it is deep, but the loop has a low-friction, arcade-brained momentum that works best in short sessions. Here is where I have to be straight with you, though. The community reception after full launch settled at roughly 47 percent positive on Steam, and the criticisms are not trivial. Driving controls are slippery in the old-school way - intentionally so, echoing GTA 2's notorious oversteer - but the game does not always feel like it earns that friction. Performance has been a recurring complaint, with frame-rate dips reported even on capable hardware. The writing leans hard into edgy-teenager energy, and the story is best treated as set dressing rather than something to invest in emotionally. Mission logic can break, waypoints occasionally point to nowhere, and the onboarding drops you into gang firefights before the controls feel natural in your hands. For a certain player, none of that will matter. If you have nostalgia for the chaos of GTA 1 and 2, if you find meditative value in roaming a neon city causing mayhem without needing a narrative reason, Glitchpunk offers a real, if rough, version of that. The in-game radio alone has more personality than the rest of the package combined, and the android-hacking mechanic adds a layer of creativity to firefights that the genre rarely bothers with. The pixel-adjacent art style divides opinion but I find it fits the sleazy, transhumanist tone well enough. Just go in knowing this is a game that knows what it is and does not particularly want to be more.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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