The ability to rise and fall with your vehicle is an excellent and essential touch, given the verticality of the city design. For the most part though, the gameplay is relaxing the enjoyment comes in taking in the scale of the city and the characters within it, rather than high-octane driving. This minute-to-minute driving gameplay feels smooth, as your HOVA unit has a slipperiness to it, and there are just enough obstacles in the form of other vehicles and buildings to keep you focused. They’re at their best when you’re speeding through the city, weaving around skyscrapers and swooping down into one of the radiant blue highways which are cleverly incentivised to the player by providing a general speed boost. The art style and voxel graphics work well to complement the sizable scope of Nivalis. In the best cases, there’s a twist on the trope that freshens these concepts, like the surprise identity reveal of your HOVA’s (hover car’s) A.I., Camus.
But what it does take from atypical cyberpunk narratives, in regards to concepts like android rights, totalitarian police states and neon-soaked vistas, it manipulates well. In this respect, Nevalis isn’t reinventing the augmented wheel in terms of cyberpunk tropes. So too does it evoke Parasite in the literal high-low divide of its class structure, whilst Cloudpunk as an enterprise feels not too dissimilar from the pizza delivery services found in Snow Crash, an influence directly noted by the game’s developers.
Cloudpunk wears its inspirations on its sleeve there’s a hefty dose of Blade Runner and Fifth Element weaved through its design. Though Cloudpunk boasts an eclectic cast of characters – more on that later – the most work has clearly gone into developing the city itself. The current of people and ideas and the crowds they wash everything away”.
“Making it here is like trying to paint on the surface of a river.