Tokyo 42 Review – PC

Tokyo 42 has been on my radar for a while, ever since I saw a teaser trailer for it several months ago. Even from that first glimpse of what was to come, I could tell that the game had gameplay and an art style that was fairly unique, but that seemed to be right up my alley.

The first thing that I noticed about the game was that the isometric perspective, though familiar, is still very unique, particularly due to the range at which you are viewing the world around you. From your lofty perspective, it is easy at times to feel like you’re looking down on a miniature world.

When you first enter the world, you are presented, very rapidly, with a synopsis of the world and your situation as it is, which is that you have been framed for murder and in order to try and discover the identity of the person who framed you…you decide to become an assassin and begin murdering people…

Yeah.

Oh, and you can’t really die. If you die, you regenerate at the last place where you bought a can of soda from a vending machine.

Yup.

There is an open-world aspect to the game, which exists in a surprisingly vast, varying, and complex futuristically-designed city that swarms with a mixture of civilians going about their regular lives, gangs that will see your presence in their territory as a threat, and juicy, juicy targets that will simultaneously line your bank account and build your reputation until it gets high enough for you to draw the attention of the people in the dark, seedy underworld of crime that will help you find the person who framed you.

The gunplay is fast and furious and sometimes frustrating because of the strange camera angles. Even though you can turn your camera around 360 degrees, in 45-degree increments, there are certain places where the verticality of the city causes buildings to obscure your view in awkward ways as bullets fly and you try to avoid them while returning fire. Bullet travel time is a factor, so you find yourself in situations reminiscent of other bullet-hell style games. In Tokyo 42, one shot kills, so one false move will find you popping open another can of soda and trying again at whatever task you were attempting before you caught a bullet.

The shooting mechanics can sometimes feel a bit awkward because of the very three-dimensional nature of the world, and the inherent two-dimensional nature of your aiming cursor. However, because there are so many built-in checkpoints and the game does such a good job of lightening the consequence of death, that failure is more of a learning tool than a source of frustration.

There are stealth mechanics built into the game, as well, so for those of you who would rather try and take out the targets quietly, with a little less fuss, there are ways to go about doing that by sneaking past guards, finding alternate routes, or by quietly murdering everyone with a melee weapon of your choosing, rather than going in guns blazing.

Perhaps one of my earliest complaints about the game, however, was that the AI was pretty hard to figure out. Their ability to see you was somehow difficult to predict, and once they were alerted to your presence, the entire group of enemies would respond with immediate hostility, rather than having to sound an alarm or something like that, which could serve to be frustrating if you were trying to stealth your way through and it all got messed up because one guy happened to notice you just before you ran him through with your katana.

The game’s graphics are somewhat retro-futuristic, with a very vibrant color palette. The city is strange and surreal in its design, with gigantic sculptures of strange things, temples to unknown deities, and dizzyingly precarious levels. Surrounding the base of the buildings are clouds, which implies the height of the city and that you are predominantly spending your time on the tops of it, except for the times that you’re falling from it.

There is a multiplayer aspect to the game, as well, but I’m assuming that because the game is less well-known, I was never able to find a multiplayer game to get into. From what I have seen, it appears that these multiplayer matches are deathmatches of a few players trying to get to a certain number of kills first on a smaller map than the single-player city. There are civilians that will roam the multiplayer maps and you can choose to try and blend in and get the drop on your opponents before identifying yourself as a hostile.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed the silly, over-the-top nature of this game. It begs you to suspend your disbelief and just kind of go with it, which I was able to do. It’s a simple game, with a pretty basic premise, but it has satisfying results.

Screenshot Gallery




Author: Brice Boembeke
My first memories of gaming are from when I was 5 years old and my dad got a Commodore 64. It has been almost 30 years and my passion for gaming has only grown. I play a little bit of everything, but am particularly interested in the emergent and unscripted gameplay that comes from open world, sandbox-style online multiplayer games. It is a very exciting time to be a gamer, but I still feel like the best is yet to come. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *