The Technomancer asks a lot of a player before it gives anything back. Spiders built a Mars RPG around electric powers, three fighting styles and a story about a rookie hunted by his own guild. It shipped in 2016 for PlayStation 4, PC and Xbox One, published by Focus Home Interactive, with a score by Olivier Deriviere. The ambition is real. The execution is not.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Zachariah Runs From Ophir
You play Zachariah, a former delinquent from Abundance, one of the water guilds ruling the red planet. He is a rookie technomancer, and soon after his initiation the guild’s secret police put him on the run. He flees the city of Ophir with a group of companions and takes refuge in Noctis, a hidden merchant city, where he starts hunting for a working communications beacon to reestablish contact with Earth.
The setting is the War of Water, 200 years after humans colonized Mars. The game shares a universe with Spiders’ earlier Mars: War Logs, and it wears that inheritance plainly. Tribal communities, cities lost under the ice, dystopian shanties across the dust — the map promises a planet of hard places.
Four Skill Trees, Three Fighting Styles
Combat comes in three styles, backed by four skill trees and the destructive electric powers of the technomancers. You add companions to your party, and they level up alongside you. You craft weapons and armor for yourself and for them, and you nurture those relationships over the course of the adventure.
Not every problem is solved with brute strength. Dynamic conversation dialogue drives quests, and decisions change the story as you go. The game has three endings, each slightly modified by several major choices made along the way.
That structure is the strongest thing in The Technomancer. It is also where the game stretches thinnest.
| System | What it offers | Where it lands |
|---|---|---|
| Combat | Three fighting styles, four skill trees | Repetitive encounters |
| Dialogue | Choices that shift quests and story | The real draw |
| Companions | Party members who level up, crafting | Underused by the plot |
| Endings | Three, altered by major choices | Rewards a second run |
Mars Is a Hard Place to Like
The world is the problem. Mars here is a cruel, iron-fisted place, and the game wants you to feel that in every district. What you feel instead is friction. Combat leans on the same loops across long stretches, and the electric powers that should define a technomancer rarely change how a fight plays out.
The dialogue system carries the weight the combat cannot. Branching quests and three endings give the choices consequence, and that is worth something. But consequence is not the same as character. The companions you recruit and craft for never become the reason to keep going.
Faced with the cruelty of Mars’ iron-fist enforcers and wild-life, can you survive long enough to uncover the truth behind The Technomancer?
That is the pitch, and it is a good one. It is also a question the game answers slowly and without much surprise.
What the Score Says
The Technomancer holds a 6.2 out of 10 critic aggregate across 18 outlets. That number is fair. This is a game with a clear identity — Mars, water guilds, technomancers, a beacon to Earth — and a structure that keeps promising more than it delivers. Spiders had the pieces: three styles, four trees, three endings, a composer of Deriviere’s caliber. The pieces do not cohere.
The part worth watching is the dialogue. If Spiders had built the whole game around the choices, the companions and the crafting, the seams in combat would matter less. Instead the fights are the spine, and the spine is the weakest bone.
Buy it for the branching quests and the three endings, if you buy it at all. The Technomancer is a 6.2 of 10.
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