☁️ Cloudpunk: City of Ghosts PC Review 9/10 ☁️ @Pixel Hunted @ionlands #IndieGames #GameDev

Cloudpunk has proved to be a marmite game. You play a delivery driver piloting a flying car in a vast dystopian metropolis. With heavy influences from Blade Runner and The Fifth Element, you swoop through a perpetually rainy metropolis, past gigantic neon billboards, and weave through oncoming traffic.

Despite the vaguely action-game veneer, Cloudpunk is heavily story-based, with the open-world driving merely the stage for a series of future shock stories. Every job reveals more about the hellscape city of Nivalis, its residents, and its politics.

I enjoyed cruising around and soaking up the ambience. It’s a great game to kick back to as it presents no real challenge. The flipside to that is that many understandably found the very laid-back atmosphere and lack of gameplay variation dull.

The recent DLC, City of Ghosts, goes some way to cranking up the excitement. Accurately billed as a “sequel-sized” add-on it picks up where Cloudpunk left off, continuing the tale of immigrant worker Rania and her AI dog Camus. Tossed into the mix is another playable character: drug-addled hustler Hayse, who we meet while being arrested by trainee CorpoBot Morpho (who soon becomes his sceptical sidekick).

What follows is a significantly higher-stakes adventure than the main game. Rania is still the focus, with her prior decisions now earning her unwanted attention from Nivalis’ powerful elite: there are sequences where she’s hunted by a Terminator-like robot, is chased through the exploding undercity, and struggles with a particularly sadistic mind virus.

By the time the credits roll City of Ghosts has retroactively made Cloudpunk better - especially as it delivers a satisfying resolution to its story. But the game really shines in its narrative vignettes: meeting a woman whose bionic implants block out negative people, a cryogenically frozen astronaut who revives for a single day every hundred years, and a hilarious bratty teen punk rocker careening between gigs.

There’s a distinct 2000AD vibe to these stories and each of them expands on Cloudpunk’s unerringly well-thought-out setting. Whereas the first game established the hierarchy of the city (upper-class up top, lower-class down below), City of Ghosts goes into more detail on the iron grip this rampant future capitalism has on its citizens. With no government to speak of, Corpos are effectively gods - with Rania discovering that if a giant delivery conglomerate wants to poach her from Cloudpunk and enslave her, there’s not much she can do about it.

The original game was already refreshing in putting you in the shoes of a zero-hours contract worker stuck in a legally grey job, but while it explored her status as an outsider, this DLC shows exactly how vulnerable Rania is while in Nivalis. Sure, the city is pretty, but now it finally feels like the cruel oligarchal hell it was described as.

But it's not all satisfying anticapitalist themes! Now you can go street racing! Sadly I didn’t get on well with this. Even getting into a race requires some fiddly questing and when you’re there it’s no great shakes.

City of Ghosts is a definite improvement on Cloudpunk: The writing is sharper, the narrative moves faster, the voice acting is more emotive, the new character Hayse is very fun, and the situations you’re placed in are more dynamic and tense. If you liked the core game, picking this DLC up is a no-brainer: I now consider the original Cloudpunk as the first chapter in a two-part story.