During my time with Steampunker, I wished that I could be anyone else in the world. I don’t mean that I wish I could have played as a different character. I mean that I wished I was not Isaac Davis, Hardcore Droid writer. Because the fact is that no one else will ever have to finish this game. Steampunker is a game that begs to be put down at every step, and I am the only person who was not allowed to put it down.
Steampunker is an adventure game set, oddly enough, in a steampunk world that is under attack by alien robots. You play as a man named Vincent, following the orders of a stock photo sexy lady wearing goggles and a top hat, as you try to save the world from said robots. The basic gameplay consists of tapping around the environment to find items or puzzles, then completing those stand-alone puzzles on separate screens. Puzzles range from memory games to redirecting pipes, even to a short game of bootleg Bejeweled.
If any of that sounds like fun, I assure you, it isn’t. The mere act of moving Vincent around the world is a nightmare, wherein he walks with none of the urgency expected from a robot invasion, and he must stop at the first tapped location before accepting any further input from you, the supposed player. This gets even worse in later (spoiler!) space levels, where he floats even slower than he walks. Most puzzles lie somewhere between “boring” and “buggy.” The aforementioned Bejeweled puzzle does not recognize combos greater than three, and there is no scoring or timer to speak of. You just sort of play until it stops you.
Periodically, you’ll come to a puzzle that requires items from elsewhere in the world, which results in a mind-numbing hidden object game as you try to search the crowded photo-collage backgrounds for said tiny items. Luckily, you can tap a button in the lower right that will highlight all the items onscreen. Paradoxically, I was begging for this button before I found it (it’s never introduced), but once found, it made the whole errand completely trivial. These items cause their own problems, too. Upon returning to a puzzle that required three identical valves, I placed the three valves into the three proper slots with no success, only to find that each slot is intended for a particular valve. Despite, you know, the identicalness.
It’s not as if the game gets by on its looks, either. Those photo-collage backgrounds are covered in bad Photoshop filters and blown-out whites. Vincent himself seems to be polygonal, but his animation is stiff and sluggish. The music, most of it mellow acoustic guitar, seems entirely out of place and, in one part, plays over sounds that are necessary to complete a puzzle. There are no sound options in place, so you can’t even distract yourself from the game with a podcast.
And it’s a shame, because Steampunker is the effort of one person, a person who clearly wanted to make something worthwhile. The range of activities in the game is impressive by any standard, let alone for a one-man project. In a couple sections, you use your device’s gyroscope to shoot robots and asteroids out of the sky with full 360-degree movement, an interesting change, though ridiculous for a game you’re expected to play on the go. And I was legitimately shocked when the game became a Megaman-style platformer (albeit a clumsy one) toward the end. There are plenty of games on Android that are made by far more people with far less design ambition. Unfortunately, most of those games are still more fun.
But, pray tell, is it Hardcore?
Certainly not.
You can buy Steampunker if you really want to, but you’ll delete it by the time you reach the submarine.
