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TOKYO 42
Platform: PC
64

Tokyo 42 Review

Just let this one Shin-juke-you

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Tokyo 42 has a coat button. As in, a button exclusively for putting on your coat. Press it once and the garment instantly materializes out of thin air, primitive physics flaring the hem momentarily before settling. Press it again and the coat is gone, spirited into the ether by nanomachines or some other unseen force. Whether or not you’re wearing a coat has no bearing on anything in the game, and thanks to the relative size of your character on-screen, its cosmetic effects are trivial too, yet somebody thought it deserved an easy-to-reach button so you could toggle it anywhere, any time. It’s eccentric, unnecessary, downright silly, and utterly marvelous. Why am I focusing on it right up front? Not because it represents the game as a whole, but because it stands out. It’s a glimmer of the strange, excessive, delightful experience that I wish Tokyo 42 was, but like many of the game’s better facets, it’s only significant because everything else holds such a dull sheen.

Tokyo 42

So here we are in Tokyo, 2042—yes, yes, well done, we see what you did there—and you, a faceless drone living the faceless drone life in this squeaky-clean megacity, have just been framed for murder. Proper murder, that is; the old-fashioned kind. In a world where a mysterious global pharmaceutical corporation has made everyone functionally immortal with regeneration nanomachines, most people don’t have to worry about dying anymore, but evidently at least one person did, very momentarily. It’s the sort of speculative premise that sounds like it’d lead naturally into some half-decent ponderous sci-fi, which is why it’s sort of perplexing that the game largely shoves it under the bed and instead focuses on you. Hunted by the police, forced to take the fall for God-knows-who, you set out to clear your name, unravel the conspiracy and seek revenge by… becoming an assassin. Well, the damage is already done, I suppose; having real blood on your hands is probably an afterthought.

Don’t worry if the delicate touch isn’t your forte, mind: the ‘assassin’ thing shapes your objectives somewhat, but the overall experience is primarily that of an open-world game that somebody left in the dryer: a condensed weave of sneaking, shooting, jumping, exploring, and (very occasionally) driving, partitioned off into missions and scattered across a world of secrets, collectibles, and squishy civilians. There’s a somewhat nostalgic whiff of the old Grand Theft Autos about the progression structure, which sees you take on some petty small-time murders, then some larger murders, then get tied up in a power struggle that involves doing more murders, then earn the trust of a character by doing some murders for them, and so on, working your way up until you’re in a position of sufficient power to do something about the baddies. Like ‘murder’.

As with most open-world games, though, the only character worth caring about is The City. Japanese megacities are to near-future sci-fi what dingy detectives’ offices are to hard-boiled noir, but SMAC’s clean, abstract vision of Tokyo is a stylish breath of fresh air; a utopian playset for the cyberpunk kids who dream of a life above the clouds, with flying merchant barges, hanging gardens and open plazas. Everything is so bold, colourful and bite-sized, like a bowl of lollies daring you to lean over and sample its plastic, sugary flavours. It’s a world where late modernist architecture still reigns supreme, molding concrete and glass into geometrically perfect forms, painting them with bright pastels, coding a rare kind of optimism into the landscape. Strange monuments and public sculptures are dotted here and there; vague manifestations of a future culture you will never quite be made privy to.

Tokyo 42

At least, not so long as you’re viewing it through the end of a telescope. Tokyo 42’s sky-high camera is a lot more than an excuse to skip drawing everyone’s facial features. Between the great distance, the narrow field of view and the rotation being locked to 45 degree increments, your almost-orthographic view of the game is kept under very tight constraints, and the world has been designed with this in mind. Oddly enough, more than anything else it reminds me of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker; there are all sorts of secrets hidden in plain sight, just waiting for you to spin the camera the right way at the right time and reveal some subtle trick of the architecture. Neat parallel lines play tricks on your eyes, and it’s so easy for spatial relationships to go unnoticed until you focus on some building in the background and realize you were clambering over its facade not that long ago.

More than obfuscation, though, Tokyo 42’s presentation is an exercise in isolation. With the perspective of some cloud-dwelling deity, more conducive to en-masse command of faceless troops and clone-stamped tanks than minute control, the lone human under your control feels lost and vulnerable; a minnow in a sea of autonomous agents, sending ripples of chaos through the crowds. Even gunfights are little more than brief breakouts of soft tap-tap-taps, tiny puffs of smoke and droplets of blood, not leaving so much as a mark on the delicate diorama playsets of the rooftops. You’re a disconnected actor, trying to get a tiny person out from under the shadow of a sinister conspiracy—a tiny person who, thanks to the power of nanotech, doesn’t even keep the same face long enough to have an identity. They’re a mannequin, and all you’re here to do is make them dance for the people in power.

But as much as the camera giveth, you may find that it taketh more away. Having all the depth perception of a grizzled eyepatch-wearing sniper gazing down a telescopic sight is all very well for fun architecture trickery and stylish presentation, but in the midst of a hectic gunfight or platforming challenge, you very quickly start to pine for the lost ability to judge relative distances. Tokyo 42 recognizes that this is a problem—you get a little marker that traces to the ground directly underneath you, and the depth of field automatically focuses on wherever you’re aiming—but it’s still so, so easy to get clipped by a bullet that appeared to be sailing over your head, or make a brave leap to a nearby-looking rooftop that’s actually several bus-lengths away. Yes, sometimes you can spin the camera around and get a slightly better idea of where things lie, but the luxury of time is not something you often have, and if you try it in the heat of the moment you may well find your view obstructed by a ruddy great big skyscraper. That’s not an interesting limitation, unless you earnestly enjoy your cat jumping up in front of your monitor in the middle of a Counter-Strike match.

Tokyo 42

Still, it is probably the most interesting thing going on when it comes to conflict. Tokyo 42 touts freedom of approach to a certain extent, in that very particular school of design where it means ‘stealth or go loud’. Or, in this case, stealth for as long as humanly possible and go loud when you mess it up, because the methodical, ordered process of silently cutting dudes down with a katana is always preferable to being assaulted by a hail of bullets from a dozen different directions at once. That’s not to say either option is particularly enticing, mind: sneaking is primarily focused on staying out of line of sight, with the ability to randomize your appearance or don a temporary disguise to elude pursuers—not that the former is much use to you in a ‘restricted zone’, where the overwhelming majority of missions take place—and being spotted by anyone at all immediately flips the entire area over into full alert. Gunfights, when they break out, largely gravitate to dry cover-based shooting, made remarkable only by the presence of a punishing mean streak. The combination of one-hit kills and frequent checkpoints seems to be geared towards a tight learning loop—try, die, ascertain what went wrong, repeat—but there’s not really a whole lot to be learned besides “don’t pop your head up when everyone’s firing at you, dingus”. You get plenty of weapons to toy with, but variety doesn’t do a whole lot to elevate a formula that’s ultimately about as satisfying as pitching rocks at the garden wall.

What could elevate it would be if the scenarios Tokyo 42 put you in were a bit more dynamic; a bit more likely to surprise with emergent situations. Here and there, like concrete piles jutting above the waterline, there are features that tentatively suggest such ambitions, but on their own they don’t really accomplish an awful lot. Squads of rival factions roam the world, engaging in quick, fierce battles whenever they collide, but other than the simple spectacle they don’t offer a whole lot for you to do, besides mopping up the survivors and pocketing the spoils of war. Killing too many civilians—either by accident, or through an idle taste for mindless violence—triggers a ‘cop drop’, wherein increasingly powerful tiers of police units are airlifted in to take care of you, not unlike the police star system from Grand Theft Auto and heaven knows how many other open-world games. Crucially, however, there aren’t any vehicles here to enable thrilling high-speed chases—unless you count a slippery not-Harley-Davidson motorcycle that’s about as suited to the pedestrian precincts as an incontinent rhino is to the London Underground—so you can only engage with them through evasion or cover-based shooting. At which point, the question becomes “why?”

Then you have the Nemesis mechanic, which actually shows some real promise and takes full advantage of the game’s presentation. Essentially, at any given time—though usually after a mission, for some reason—the game pops up a little message to let you know that another assassin—a Nemesis—is on your tail. Somewhere in the rooftop crowds is a visually nondescript figure who’s been paid to put a bullet in your head, and sooner or later they’re going to make a move. You can try to draw them out, flee somewhere safer, watch carefully for a pedestrian behaving abnormally, or just fire indiscriminately at people and hope you hit them, but they’re going to need dealing with one way or another. It brings to mind a lot of experimental social stealth games, along with hints of Dark Souls’ world invasions or Watch Dogs’ fixers, but there’s just one problem: the Nemesis is an NPC too, and not a particularly subtle one at that. You get an adorable little ‘tracker cat’ after one mission, whose entire functional role is to home in on and eventually identify any would-be assassins, but I ended up almost never deploying my fuzzy feline friend; you can identify the Nemesis just as easily in most situations by standing still for a moment and shooting the first person who makes a beeline for you. It’s rude to speculate about these things, I know, but it really does make you wonder if the mechanic was meant to be multiplayer at some point, before some hitherto unseen obstacle forced it to be hurriedly reworked for the final release.

Tokyo 42

This suspicion grows once you enter Tokyo 42’s actual multiplayer—consisting of a functional if somewhat insubstantial deathmatch mode—in which a lot of elements feel like they’ve finally found their place. You can, of course, just run around firing a gun at anything that moves, but it’s a lot more fun to try to blend in: mimicking NPC movement patterns, scanning the arena for strange behaviour, lashing out at someone suspicious and hurriedly trying to melt back into the crowd when it turns out you just decapitated an innocent street cleaner. Tracker cats keep things on a nice cycle by ensuring nobody can remain incognito forever, and trying to keep up your façade as you stalk another player is unexpectedly tense knowing that a warm, purring kitty is on-track to blow your cover. Maps are small enough that camera issues rarely rear their ugly head, and while the fundamental combat systems don’t exactly lend themselves to competitive shootybangs, it’s a fun little dose of casual shenanigans while it lasts. Everything meshes together rather neatly into an experience that honestly feels fresher than the main game, which leaves me equal parts pleased and perplexed. As with most indie games of Tokyo 42’s reach, the server list is a bit of a ghost town, but if you can find a match it’s well worth a look.

Despite its slick minimalist style and modest ambitions, in many ways Tokyo 42 feels like a reflection of the kind of bland, ankle-deep open-world blockbuster design that we seem to be perpetually trying to get away from these days; competent, with one or two interesting gimmicks glued to the side, but crying out for more meaningful direction. It’s all a bit wearisome: the basic stealth, the pop-up shooting-gallery combat, the half-hearted offer of being able to choose between the two, the light platforming, and of course, the collectibles you aren’t all that excited about but still go out of your way to snag in order to squeeze more out of the world. Yes, the camera adds a few interesting considerations, but it’s not enough to recontextualize the entire rigmarole, and neither are the few cute distractions that manage to get away from it. Tokyo 42 is a functional product, there’s no contesting that, but for such a well-presented game, with a narrative premise that showed real potential, I’m afraid it’s—if you’ll excuse me—a long way from killing it.

Our ratings for Tokyo 42 on PC out of 100 (Ratings FAQ)
Presentation
84
Utilizes its precise camera setup to deliver an aesthetically pleasant, ordered view of the bold, clean, minimalist dioramas that make up the city, albeit sometimes at the expense of visibility. If anything’s a selling point, it’s this.
Gameplay
60
Spreads itself across a few bases, from stealth to gunplay to occasional platforming, but doesn’t really manage to achieve a deep or satisfying experience in any of them. One or two cute one-off gimmicks brighten things up
Single Player
62
Takes a sort-of interesting sci-fi idea and puts it to one side so it can concentrate on a vaguely relevant conspiracy/vengeance plot. Nothing particularly wrong with the progression formula, assuming you’re not yet tired of open-world games.
Multiplayer
73
A light stealth-action deathmatch mode where a few of the game’s mechanics unexpectedly spring to life. Finding a match won’t be easy, but it’s worth dipping your toes in, if you can.
Performance
(Show PC Specs)
CPU: Intel i7-6700K
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080
RAM: 16GB DDR4
OS: Windows 7 Premium 64-bit
PC Specs

81
It’s a little too easy to get stuck in some places, or break mission logic by doing things in a way the developers didn’t anticipate, but by and large the game runs without complaints.
Overall
64
Tokyo 42 offers a stylish, polished, well-presented open world that’s unfortunately just not an awful lot of fun to do anything in. A few nice touches put a spark in its heart, but they can’t light up the overall experience.
Comments
Tokyo 42
Tokyo 42 box art Platform:
PC
Our Review of Tokyo 42
64%
Adequate
The Verdict:
Game Ranking
Tokyo 42 is ranked #1517 out of 1957 total reviewed games. It is ranked #129 out of 174 games reviewed in 2017.
1516. Dangerous Golf
PC
1517. Tokyo 42
1518. Cars 3: Driven to Win
Xbox One
Screenshots

Tokyo 42
9 images added Jun 17, 2017 20:35
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