Kisai's 2400 AD Review

Setting

2400 AD is set in a futuristic domed city on a moon called Metropolis. There were these aliens, called Tzorgs, who were once friendly to your culture, then became unfriendly, took over the city, decided that they were all needed elsewhere, and left en masse, leaving behind an army of robots to captivate the population. You now live in an automated police state, forced to check in at a control center, randomly searched for contraband , followed by spying robots, and requiring proper clearance to travel. Your mission is to shut it all down.

Gameplay

Solving 2400 AD is like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. At first, you have no clue about what to do besides try to contact someone named Spider. The city is large and there are plenty of people to talk to. Some have useful information tied to keywords. As the clues and pieces come together, you get a better and better viewpoint on how to win the game.

Theme

2400 AD does a bang-up job of picturing one living in a police state. I don't know of any other games that have attempted to portray this setting. You will feel afraid and demoralized as a police bot makes a beeline for you. Most of the citizens feel mad, but helpless, at the situation.

Character Generation

You play a unisex blonde with a green shirt on. You may name your blonde and assign 99 points to four stats: Energy (which doubles as strength and hit points) Agility (to hit things with), IQ (so that you may fix your breakables) and Affinity (which lets you be friendly with people). After a quick amount of gameplay, you will learn that Affinity is useless, IQ is mostly useless, and eventually Agility won't be that useful either. Each of your stats will increase as you use them, which can be as simple as deciding to jog around a bit... Oh, and breaking down a door, which you'll do a lot, costs you 20 Energy.

Villainy

There is no figurehead villan. All of the robots follow their programming, which are specific behaviors and tasks for each model. It is their integration that makes them so dangerous, as you'll have to figure out weaknesses in their behavior.

Spoilers

The game is very open-ended, with all of the perks and minuses of wandering around without a forced plotline. In fact, you'll probably contact the resistance before completing the quest that would lead you to do so, since finding the resistance is easier than completing that part of the "plot".

In the beginning, the hardest part is to find out how the heck are you going to get money. You will be arrested... a lot. Escaping from jail is so laughably easy, the only thing more laughable is that they put you in the same cell every single time. I don't know if there was a glitch in my game or not, but the documentation threatens you with a death sentence if you accumulate five social demerits. Every time I got thrown in jail, my demerits reset, which is weird, but hey, if the robots can't keep their citizens in order, so much the better for us, ne?

Because there are no levels, your tools determine how excellent a fighter are you. Once you find a way to make money and buy a medium shield, you will start to be the boogeyman to these robots. The game takes a delightful turn as you go from helpless, please-don't-take-my-stuff, citizen to an all-out-of-bubblegum badass.

Winning the game challenges more of your puzzle skills than fighting skills. There was one (Argh!) box-pushing puzzle which I managed to get stuck inside. Fortunatly, you can actually call the robots to come and get you to put you in a nice cell, which I did. :)