There’s a necessary osmosis to genre hype in any media, and gaming is no different. Cyperpunk was getting a little too big for its own good, what with the success of Shadowrun Returns and the muted excitement for CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077, we needed a game like Dex to remind us that not all things cyberpunk – or even dystopian future – are a guaranteed success. This isn’t a game looking to revolutionise in any way, essentially intending little more than to appeal to genre fans who have admittedly limited options these days.
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The story is a functional one, if not completely and utterly typical, too. It involves sentient AIs, seedy criminal underworlds and the mysterious and pervasive secret organisation fixated on your player character – named Dex. It’s not that the story or its world is unoriginal – the genre itself is pretty much fixed in place with so many mandatory tropes by now it’ll likely never offer something new again – it’s just that it’s told with no real sense of freshness or surprise.
The fact that the gameplay itself provides very little fulfilment means it fails to even utilise the often unique elements of the genre in this aspect. It’s a welcome addition that you can pick your own playstyle – be it firearm combat, melee, hacking or bypassing all that entirely through speech and stealth – but the situations are all far too explicit. There’s no sense of achievement earned from deciding – and succeeding – to play the game in a particular way, when specifically placed items, obvious safe dialogue options or clearly designed routes through an area signal your available options to you. Combat, too, is lacking, with stunted animations making it much easier to kick-jump your way through the entire game.
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All of that is confounded even more by the fact that this game is really quite buggy. Controller support is erratic, while an enemy combatant’s AI routines are so simple they’re far too easy to exploit. Among countless issues comes other more crucial faults, such as bugged quests, death during cinematics, fatal crashes and unreliable saving of progress, a cardinal sin for any game. Dex just isn’t stable enough to recommend, even if a romp through cyberspace and rain-slicked, neon-glowing city streets might have appealed to you. It offers all the right elements that the genre needs, but fails to utilise them in any particularly original, entertaining or – indeed – working state.
