Glitchpunk
Cars and commentary collide in GTA2’s spiritual successor
PC
Grand Theft Auto has made roadkill of almost every challenger over the years – True Crime: Streets of LA, Sleeping Dogs and APB all lie flattened on the highway of history. The trick, as a plucky would-be-mimic, is to choose your target carefully – and Glitchpunk developer Dark Lord has picked GTA2, the half-forgotten 1999 sequel. Back then, the series was still in top-down 2D, and experimenting in the realm of dystopian sci-fi.
“I was surprised during pre-production that not many games looked in this direction,” says Maciej Karbownik, Dark Lord’s founder and lead developer. “All the personal nostalgia aside, I consider the core gameplay loop of GTA2 an example of genius simplicity, that incorporates my favourite elements from both real-world simulations and arcade shooters.”
Like GTA2, Glitchpunk is a goldfish bowl of rudimentary urban life. Pedestrians and police officers trundle up and down streets, and traffic moves in parallel, every vehicle on the road obediently stopping at junctions and sticking to the appropriate lane. It’s this impression of conformity that’s so thrilling to subvert, making battlefields of junctions and roads of sidewalks.
As a newcomer, you take contracts from one of three criminal factions, and swapping sides is encouraged. Your standing with each is malleable, and visible constantly onscreen. Run down too many synthetic pedestrians and you’ll need to pay off your own bounty before the Android Liberation Front will send you out on assignment. “The amount of contrasts in both views and perspectives allows us to pitch all the gangs against each other in many interesting ways,” Karbownik says. “You will find conservative fanatics as well as radical leftist gangs making life for people and androids miserable.”
That may sound as if Dark Lord has been noncommittal in its own perspective – but the developer isn’t so much fence-sitting as driving right down the middle of that fence, launching shards of wood at all sides of the political spectrum. “In our latest demo, players were able to witness one [faction] called Ordo,” Karbownik says. “It’s inspired
This impression of conformity is thrilling to subvert, making battlefields of junctions
by one of many Polish religious organisations which currently try to stir things up and lead our country in a direction pretty close to nationalism. We don’t beat around the bush too much, really, but at the same time try to make sure that you meet a wide enough cast of characters you might tend to either identify with or want to antagonise.”
In each story episode you pick a gang to join, enabling a branching plot of the kind
Rockstar has never attempted. Firefights, meanwhile, are Nuclear Throne-inspired affairs that could never be carbon dated to pre-2000. But some of its makeup still feels like a throwback too far. The top-down view and moody lighting mean it’s easy to squash a citizen you didn’t see and trigger a police shootout when you were simply driving from A to B. Worse, you’re as liable to be knocked down yourself, leading to deaths that can feel like random events rather than important lessons. Thankfully, contracts can be restarted with a button press, and Dark Lord has done away with GTA2’s punishing score system, which halved your multiplier with every arrest. “It was one of my first decisions as a lead designer and producer to get rid of those,” Karbownik says. “We are much more interested in what future instalments of GTA brought to the table: hideouts, infinite lives and a more accessible save system.”
That’s not to say Dark Lord isn’t interested in multiplication – its wanted system goes all the way up to ten, and Karbownik won’t tell us what’s at the top. “I would like to leave this as a surprise for the players to experience, just as when I played GTA2 for the first time,” he says. “Let me just say that the expected GTA2 experience ends somewhere in the middle.”