Neocron is one of the three remaining cities on Earth created and developed from the ruins of World War III. This post-apocalyptic city has emerged after several hundred years of fighting, disease, pollution, torment and suffering, but has culminated in a strange discovery. A spacecraft with 3,000 settlers on a mission to the Irata colonies, once deemed destroyed, and ironically the wrongful cause of WWIII, finally re-establishes contact. This contact spoke of a paradise not seen on Earth for over 700 years.

Introduction

Neocron is an action MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) set in a post apocalyptic metropolis in the 28th century. The public English demo we tested is an offline demo. All NPCs in the demo are computer controlled bots whereas you will mostly run into real people behind the virtual figures in the full game. It does not make sense to examine Neocron's qualities as an MMORPG by means of the offline demo. That's why we will only try to give you a few general impressions of Neocron's basic gameplay and technical stuff like graphics, sound and interface.

Gameplay, Interface, Combat & Controls

The offline demo is designed as a tutorial to teach you how to control your Neocron character in the full game. You will be introduced to the interface and the controls throughout the entire demo. There's not much room for your own explorations until the very end of the demo when you get to walk freely around town.

Your first quests are very easy to accomplish. Get a constructor tool, move on to the tech depot, equip yourself with some stuff and then build a rocket launcher to blast your way through a locked door.
You will be given directions from a female voice a.k.a "Mission Control". She will tell you what to do and an additional pop-up window will provide valuable information to help you perform certain tasks. As you proceed you will be watching cut scenes when important story events are taking place. Neocron is played from first person perspective and you will immediately feel familiar with the game in case you have ever played a first person shooter (FPS) before. However, if you're an FPS nut you will definitely have to pay the options menu a visit to reconfigure the controls to a more typical FPS setup. Some keys deviate from your standard Quake-like default control scheme. When you talk to NPCs, the camera zooms out to 3rd person perspective and you will be able to choose answers from a multiple choice menu. Combat is real time. There is no option to pause the action. Like in any typical FPS game you can walk, jump, run or crouch.
Well, that's basically it. Up to now, Neocron might as well be Half-Life or Deus Ex so let's continue by taking a look at some Neocron specific stuff.

One thing, you'll notice immediately is the huge interface with its many sub menus. It reminded me of Deus Ex but it's by far not as polished as Deus Ex' interface. It takes quite a while until you get used to the overwhelming amounts of info that can be found in all the categories. Since Neocron is an MMORPG, you will have lots of time to figure out how to quickly access all the categories and to find out what's important and what not but if Neocron were a single player RPG I could see gamers giving up after a couple of hours into the game because of that "lost in space" feeling. It probably wouldn't be as critical if Neocron were a slow paced RPG with a pause function but Neocron plays just like an FPS. Its fast paced gameplay and real time combat just doesn't go along very well with the complexity of the interface. You will have to keep track of your weapons, your armor, your inventory, your implants and your skills just to name the most important aspects. You will, of course, always want to carry the best equipment on person but this goal is not easy (or quickly) to achieve due to the limitations of the interface and due to the large variety of weapons, armor, implants and other useful equipment you'll find on your way. The demo is really short (if you rush it, you should be able to finish it in less than 2 hours). Still, the amount of different equipment that's literally thrown at you in that little time frame makes things quite confusing. You could spend a lot of time just standing around and trying to figure out what equipment to buy or wear. The item descriptions don't really help in making those decisions easier (or would you know right away what a "Crahn Energy Halo" is?)
However, you'll feel that typical urge to move on. A feel that FPS games evoke in most players. You will have to be the patient FPS gamer type to get the most out of Neocron's possibilities.
It remains to be seen whether online play is going to change this aspect of gameplay as every player will have to get used to Neocron's unusual mix of complexity and fast paced action.

Combat is fully performed in real time. You have a large variety of weapons to choose from. There aren't that many enemies in the demo. Just a few bats, rats and mutant soldiers. When you shoot at them, a small red number will indicate how much damage you did. Equipping weapons is a bit of a bitch. Instead of automatically adding the weapon to a free slot, the weapon will first be put into your inventory and you will then have to manually drag and drop it to a free quick slot. It is also quite annoying that you can't easily tell how much more ammo you got left. You will have to check the weapon stats or look it up in your inventory. What's totally beyond my recognition is that you can't reload. Your character will automatically reload the weapon when he has run out of ammo but there is little I hate more than walking out of a fight with an almost empty gun, knowing that the next fight will be accompanied by a reload pause in the midst of battle. OK, you can waste some ammo to force a reload but I'll leave it to yourself to decide whether that makes sense. You can also drag ammo from your inventory on your weapon to reload but that's really nothing but a tedious chore you'll give up quickly.
Aside from those flaws, combat is just like in any FPS. You just shoot, strafe, crouch, or take cover. The demo didn't offer any specialties regarding combat. It was very simplistic but that's surely going to change in the full version when you will eventually have to make use of the abundance of available weapon upgrades and special functions.

The controls are really easy to learn. As I said above, if you have some FPS experience you may want to reconfigure a few keys but basically you'll get along very well even with the default scheme. There were a few issues with non-detected clicks but except for that there's nothing to complain about. Thumbs up!

To finish this section of the review, let us take a look at a few nice Neocron features. Neocron allows you to build stuff with the so called constructor tool. This could turn out to be highly interesting in the full game when everyone starts searching for blue prints and sets out to gather the necessary components for a special self-constructed apparatus.
Another nice little surprise was the hacking tool because the hack itself turned out to be a mini game with a time limit. I won't spoil you. See for yourself when you play the demo.
To change your character's appearance you can use a so called "Outfitter". It's fun to play around with the many different options. I hope that Reakktor has implemented more of these nifty little things that add to entertainment value.

Technical Stuff - Graphics & Sound

Neocron's graphics did immediately remind me of Half-Life. Consider the age of Half-Life and you'll know what I'm trying to say. Any visual splendor is totally missing. The graphics have an overall dirty look to bring the post-apocalyptic world to life. Until you come to the town in the demo, it seems like Neocron uses a 16 (not 16 Bit!) color scheme. Check the screenshots in this review and in our galleries to judge for yourself. The screens were taken at a resolution of 1024x768 in true color on a GeForce4 Ti-4400 with Quincunx Anti-Aliasing enabled to improve image quality. Performance was more than satisfying on my Athlon 1400. There was an occasional stutter when "Mission Control" had something to say but except for those very few instances everything ran just fine.

Sound is also quite unspectacular. Game sounds are not even worth mentioning. They are just there. They fit to whatever makes the sound but there is nothing really special about them.
It gets a little more special when the background music sets in though. Reakktor has included some very fine ambient tunes that underline the post apocalyptic look&feel of the world. The music adds a lot to the atmosphere and you never want to turn it off since it stays nicely in the background.

Neocron does definitely not set any new standards in the tech department but that was not to be expected from an MMORPG where visual splendor consumes valuable bandwidth. Overall, Reakktor has done a good job at creating a believable post apocalyptic world. Nothing more - nothing less.

Conclusion

If I were to give Reakktor some advice it would be to seriously reconsider some design decisions related to the game's interface, character outfitting and choice of equipment. Those issues are literally show stoppers as they slow down the elsewise fast paced FPS-like gameplay a tad bit too much. You can tell that Reakktor had lots of good ideas and that they wanted to squeeze them all into the available space but sometimes you just have to make a cut or two. Neocron seems a little overloaded right now. Pro players will have fun to delve into the many options of character development and outfitting but an average player is likely going to be frustrated with so much stuff to choose from.

However, as I said in the beginning of this review, there is no way to properly judge Neocron from this offline demo. The game will be totally different when there are 1000s of human controlled characters in the world. That's why we will not rate the game with scores for every category as you're used to from our reviews. Take this review as a little piece of info, download the demo and use your imagination to find out for yourself whether you would enjoy being a part of Neocron's world when the game will be released later this year...