Mechajammer Preview

With Whalenought Studios getting ready to showcase their cyberpunk RPG Mechajammer at this year’s gamescom, you might want to prepare yourselves for the upcoming previews by reading this early one from Rock Paper Shotgun. The article touches on the game’s art style and character system, its unique approach to turn-based combat, and more.

Here’s a quick excerpt to get you started:

I was given a choice of three preset character builds when I started playing – Conrad, a male pistol expert; Mika, a stealthy knife thrower; and Adrie, a lady with a passion for wrenches, hammers and clubs. You can also create your own, or modify any of the three starter builds to your liking, including their age and gender, which can have an effect on your final stats, their name and profile art, as well as their ‘virtues’ and ‘studies’.

Studies are effectively your skill set, and you can place small stones on categories such as “One-Handed Edge”, “Slug Guns” or “Blocking” to enhance that skill, or pour them into attributes such as “Social”, “Burglary”, “Hacking”, and “Repair”. Virtues, meanwhile, are your innate traits and abilities – things like your pain threshold, how quiet you are when sneaking, how much muscle mass you have and how far you can see and discern shapes in the shadows. You have 5-6 dice to spend in each category, and I can only assume you’ll be able to throw down more dice to invest in these skills as the game progresses. In my demo build, I didn’t encounter any additional dice, nor did I seem to level up in any way that rewarded me with extra dice to spend on additional buffs.