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At the outset I really had a good feeling about SlavikPunk: Oldtimer from Red Square Games, an Eastern Bloc take on cyberpunk with a hardened veteran protagonist. Once I played the game, the reality sunk in that there are some good concepts here but they are surrounded by clunky gameplay and a story I struggled to comprehend.
The premise of the game has us controlling Yanus, a grizzled mercenary in a futuristic Eastern European cyberpunk setting based on Michał Gołkowski‘s book series. Yanus is looking to complete a job and to rescue an old friend called Rodent in the process.
Behind the scenes a femme fatale named Sonia is pulling Janus’ strings and pitting him against Rodent as she encourages his vices to control him. Yanus loses himself in a Max Payne-style drug spiral and continually faces off against hordes of bad guys and his internal demons.
At least that is the gist of the tale SlavikPunk: Oldtimer seemed to be spinning. I got lost often with the clunky dialog and blink-and-you-miss-it text transmissions that occur in mission.
The game tries to tell the story through mostly static (yet voiced) cutscenes, but supplements these with text exchanges buried in the upper right hand corner. These are tough to read because of their size, but also they pop up during frantic gameplay.
Normally if the gameplay is amazing I can forgive some rough story beats, but unfortunately aside from some neat moments the gameplay wavers between unwieldy and repetitive. This is a twin stick shooter and I constantly feel like I can’t aim where I need to fast enough, and die with little warning.
Essentially, you run around either the map or a building, with bad guys wandering around or running at you. Holding a trigger and aiming with the right stick brings the reticule where you want it and the right trigger shoots. Pretty standard stuff, but it just feels slow and unwieldy.
The developer also mapped this obscure tech attack ability to R3 (pushing the right trigger down) and I constantly opened that ability, which slows time, as I was spinning around to line up enemies. Add the sluggish movement and aiming to the ability popping up randomly, and combat can get frustrating.
There are also goons with shields who are sometimes impossible to kill unless you get behind them or use the tech ability (which is overpowered and never changes). To close out the frustrating elements, there are also points where waves of enemies come at you as a computer processes data, but I discovered if you leave one enemy alive you can wait out the clock.
Level designs quickly start to feel incredibly similar. I did however like the shortcuts and the tons of residents scattered about. The canned combat dialogue is also pretty thin and gets recycled so often I tended to play with headphones off.
There are some shining moments in the game. There is a pretty robust if confusing upgrade system for the five weapons discovered along the way. The world itself is represented in a very cool way with a deep Eastern European vibe set in a slightly dystopian near-future cyberpunk world.
The game itself is serviceable; the action can get heavy and there was mindless enjoyment strafing and blowing away hordes of baddies. There were never any “whoa” moments though.
I could tell they were trying to get there with some of the story beats, but they ultimately fell flat for me and the gameplay was not nearly enough to bridge that gap. I was hoping SlavikPunk: Oldtimer would be the Sisu of cyberpunk action games. instead it turned out to be a forgettable experience.
We were given a PS5 key by the publisher for review purposes. SlavikPunk: Oldtimer has just launched for Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 and was released last year for PC via Steam and GoG.
