Time-hopping in Berlin means queuing for hours to get to a club and then magically finding yourself back at the end of the line, or waking up on the subway three days later with ringing ears and currywurst spilled all over your acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall, where time travel means dodging bullets, redoing failed hacks and replaying conversations with bouncers that got you kicked out. “Time-hopping tactical shooter par excellence,” Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) declared in his review. Well, now it's a bloody free A time-sensitive tactical shooter. Win on Monday!
“If you love something, give it freedom,” wrote designer Jan-David Hassell in one of several excellent LinkedIn posts that made their way through my feed over the weekend. This is a relative triumph, as the site usually tends to attract posts denouncing the worthlessness of everything that's free, written in between the meticulous routine of waking up at 11:59pm the night before to drink the blood of the spreadsheets they've just killed.
Set in a futuristic Berlin in 2089, where the Cold War has not yet ended, All Walls Must Fall puts you in the shoes of a cyborg-armed, suspender-wearing, bearded, bearded operative engaged in cyber-detective work and cyber-murder in a series of techno clubs. The turn-based gameplay is halfway between a classic roguelike and real-time, allowing you to rewind and perfect your action. After each level, you can watch a replay of your actions set to a pulsating techno beat. It's very stylish and smart.
“But think of this as a snapshot, a particularly flexible still image capturing one aspect of life in a hilarious cyberpunk dystopia,” Adam writes. “By framing the entire world through the lens of a never-ending party, All Walls Must Fall creates a sense of claustrophobic, anarchic bliss. A final ecstasy before the flames. As long as you're aware of the limitations and can tolerate a few mistakes, it's worth the price of admission.” Of course, admission is now free, so this entire review has become outdated over time. So, in retrospect, is the fate of all game journalism that suffers from minor factual errors. But if you want to resist the inherent cruelty of linear timelines, you can't do worse than tighten your suspenders and go out to the cyber club for a bit.
