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Why Yes, I Would Like A Gritty Cyberpunk Grand Theft Auto

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I very much like the look of Metrocide.

Metrocide is a top-down open-world-ish game in the vein of a classic (read: pre-GTA 3) Grand Theft Auto. Difference is, instead of grandly thieving autos or sticking to other small-time crimes, you're a contract killer. Your goal? To hunt down various targets using an ever-expanding array of gadgets and turn them into cybernetically enhanced paste—but, you know, discretely.

Your itsy bitsy man-ant—though a teensy bit more murder-prone than his peers—is just as kill-able as anybody, meaning that run-ins with looming police drones don't typically go your way. It's as Gandalf once said: "Keep it secret, keep it safe, dump the body in an open manhole before that thick-as-a-brick fuckhead over there notices." This is especially key given that death is permanent in this one. No respawns with all your gear magically intact.

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The structure of the game world itself is also interesting, given that portions of it are procedurally generated. Citizen names, for instance, are pulled from a randomized version of the 2013 U.S. census.

Metrocide looks like quite a thing, especially for a small indie production. It's no Watch_Dogs, but in some ways that's a good thing. Besides, everybody already knows that Gunpoint is Watch_Dogs' smarter, more focused indie cousin. Metrocide appears to be its own animal—a stew of Grand Theft Auto, cyberpunk classic Syndicate, and its own juices—and that's just grand.

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It'll be out on Steam in October—aka, very soon.