I’ve been looking forward to Replaced for some time, even more so since playing the demo a while ago. Sad Cat Studios have created a retrofuturistic 1984 that resembles the world of Blade Runner, but where a totalitarian regime dictates the fate of ordinary citizens.
It’s a world that feels completely out of time, too. For example, your character is Reach, an AI far more sophisticated than anything we have even in the modern day, who ends up inhabiting the body of Warren Marsh, one of its creators. Reach has free will and self-awareness, and is able to pilot Warren’s body with no input from Warren himself. Although, Replaced isn’t always fully clear on the rules. Sometimes Reach talks to Warren but the conversations are all one-sided, and wonders whether Warren can swim before plunging into a river despite Reach being the one in control of the limbs.
In the opening scene, Reach escapes from his lab and ends up on the outskirts of Phoenix City as a “disposal”, that is a member of society who has had organs harvested from them before being tossed over “the Wall” and discarded. There is, naturally, a resistance movement headed up by the Matriarch and Robert Ironwood, two disposals who run the Station, a disused train station that doubles as a kind of cyberpunk shanty town complete with a bar and struggling hospital.
Drawn into the conflict after being rescued by a rebel named Tempest (actual name, seriously, Rolf Hurd) Reach repeatedly finds himself on the front lines, partly because he’s the only one with a functioning weapon. Armed with a modified DNA coded “Huxley” sidearm, Reach is uniquely positioned to effectively fight violence with violence.
The gun itself is pretty damn sweet, too. It’s essentially your multitool in Replaced, able to double as a ranged weapon and melee baton (complete with some really stylish finishers), but also equipped to create bursts of downward pressure to let you double-jump, or physically parry enemy bullets back at them. You have to charge it kinetically by using it, but it’s then a one-hit kill on any unarmoured enemy except bosses.
With no skill tree or XP system, all your skills and abilities come from Reach’s tools. The Huxley is one, but there’s also a pick axe used to latch onto broken walls, and an organiser that stores tutorials and codex entries you can pick up around the various locations. While combat is by far Replaced’s greatest strength (even if it does start to get very challenging towards the back half of the game), there’s a lot of fun to be found in the exploration. Replaced is full of environmental puzzles, none of which feel too taxing. You may need to find and use a battery to operate a fan to enable the double-jump, or take a slightly circuitous route to find a box to drop that you can then climb up on to continue on the critical path.
It’s slow-paced and Reach doesn’t accelerate above jogging pace unless the story determines that something Is chasing him, yet exploring the world and interacting with NPCs for simple side quests is worth it, as they often reward you with extra HP or more curatives. There’s a lot of story to be found in Replaced if you look and listen, and Sad Cat have done a good job of world-building using flavour text and background chatter.
But, as I stated earlier, the biggest draw is the reactive, stylistic combat. You’ll typically face off against four to five enemies at a time, with more waiting on the side lines to jump in. X initiates an attack, while pressing B will use the pickaxe to remove enemy armour. Y activates a counterattack on a yellow enemy strike (though you have to dodge the red-coded attacks), RT fires the pistol, RB deflects bullets, and LT activates Overdrive mode where you can shoot multiple enemies at the same time.
Each strike feels hefty, and the counterattacks and insta-kills are so interesting to watch that I never got bored of them. As more enemy types enter the fights, including huge armoured fighters and long-ranged snipers, it becomes a challenge to juggle all of Reach’s moves on the fly, but when you enter a flow state and wipe out a small army with barely a scratch, Replaced feels incredible.
In terms of presentation, Replaced is fairly impressive for the most part. The audio isn’t up to much, with no voice acting and little ambient music to get excited about. The visuals, though – crikey. This is a gorgeous, gorgeous game, with slick combat animations and stunning backdrops. Sad Cat play with depth perception a lot, too, having things, including Reach, move from the foreground to the background often, creating an illusion of scale that works really well in some of the cutscenes.
Some of the dialogue is a little cheesy, but it’s not enough to really negatively impact the experience (at least not for me). The story also unfolds at a fairly sedate pace, which may annoy some people. It leads to some odd pacing when the game seems to expect you to do side content between story beats but then doesn’t give you enough side content. A case in point is when Tempest in hospital and his girlfriend Victoria tells you to go, and you leave for the mission and can almost immediately go and meet Tempest somewhere entirely different. It makes sense if you do side stuff first, but this is optional and scarce.
Despite some uneven pacing, I really enjoyed Replaced. The moody aesthetic is 100% my jam, and Reach is an interesting character even if most of the supporting NPCs are pretty stock. There’s a few twists in the story, though, which stop it from feeling completely pedestrian. The combat is by far the star of the show, though. It’s so satisfying and slick that I couldn’t get enough of it, and when combined with numerous traversal puzzles, stealth sections, and action set-pieces the whole is far more glorious than the sum of its parts.
