With Apologies to China Miéville

Yes, I know what I said back in November in my post reviewing Ganymede; after I’d finished Crime and Punishment, I’d go and read a book by China Miéville to make up for picking another book at Waterstones. In the end, however, I didn’t manage to do this, for two reasons:

1) I’m weak-willed and terrified of commitment.

2) Ack-Ack Macaque has a monkey holding guns on its cover. You can’t blame me for wanting that.

Long and the short of this book is this; Ack-Ack Macaque is pretty damn good and definitely worth your time. So good I read it in two days flat, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

The plot of the book is interesting, if complex; without going into detail and risking spoiling things, there’s a conspiracy by a computer company, a soul-stealing serial killer, the threat of a nuclear war, the heir to the British throne going on the run and a sweary, daiquiri-swilling, cigar-smoking monkey who’s suffering an existential crisis. Despite the multitude of narrative threads, Gareth L. Powell manages to tie them all together very effectively, and in a manner that’s both surprising and yet makes perfect sense.

As well as the titular character of Ack-Ack Macaque himself, a monkey turned Spitfire pilot who is Brtain’s last hope in a steampunked-up version of World War Two, the book is populated by a small but interesting cast of characters; Victoria, a journalist who underwent reconstructive surgery of immense scale after a helicopter crash and now exists as a cyborg, Prince Merovech, the runaway heir to the British throne, his lover and Digital Rights Activist Julie, and the computer hacker and Ack-Ack Macaque’s wingwoman, Mindy/K8 (it’s complicated). While Ack-Ack Macaque himself is a hugely fun character to read, with a boisterous, larger than life personality that seems to explode from the page, I found Victoria was probably the most interesting, well-developed and complex character of the entire cast; the effects of the accident and her subsequent reconstruction, which has left more than half of her brain as synthetic ‘gelware’ are explored in great detail, and even though she’s more machine than woman she still retains a great deal of complexity and humanity throughout the novel. Conversely, however, Mindy/K8 feels rather undeveloped for a key character who is prevalent for a pretty big chunk of the novel; I can describe her as ‘chipper’ but that’s about it, really, and considering how well developed the other charcters are that issue does stand out rather.

It bears noting that the worldbuilding of the novel is truly stellar; going for a style touted as ‘Monkeypunk’, a good part of is set in an alternate universe in the year 2059, where Britain and France merged in the 1950s to form a new global superpower. Taking influence from Steampunk and Cyberpunk alike, the setting is well realised and detailed, its technologies and politics are key to the plot and is also an interesting exercise in flexing the old ‘what if’ muscles. I’ve no idea if Powell plans to write any more works in the setting, but if he does I’d certainly be interested to see it explored further.

If the book has a major problem, it’s probably that it simply has too many ideas going on at once. Powell manages to effectively tie them up by the end of the book, but there is so much going that the book feels like it’s rushing at points in order to get things done. In some ways, it’s a good thing, as the book gets a breathlessly intense pacing from it, but at the same time it’s trying to do and resolve so very much that there never feels like the characters have any time to breathe; almost every chapter has some kind of revelation, twist or big reveal, and while they’re all interesting it does mean that the characters themselves don’t get as much room to flex their muscles as I feel they should have had.  Yes, I can appreciate that some books have a certain pacing in order to convey a message (Crime and Punishment is so slow you can feel the pages calcify under your fingers as you read them, though that’s for the purpose of holding up a mirror to the reader of Raskolknikov’s own restlessness and frustration at his situation and shut up I’m allowed to be pretentious every once in a while!) but in this case it doesn’t seem to have any metatextual purpose.

Still, Ack-Ack Macaque is an excellent read; it’s intelligent, well-written and a lot of the time, is pure fun. If you can only get two books this month, get Ack-Ack Macaque, and get it twice.

Something for your Consideration

The Events Marshal

He had always been a man who liked to think of himself as somewhat of a hero. Not in the sense of, say, a war hero, of course, but he viewed himself as a hero nonetheless, told himself his services were needed by the many, and could only be done by the few. He was, in his own estimations, an utterly invaluable human being.

His job, no, his duty, was one of an events manager. He of course detested the title of ‘manager’. He disliked what that implied; that he merely managed, that he simply got by during the events that he was in charge of, that he managed to scrape through by the skin of his teeth. Such an idea was the gravest of insults, for in his eyes he did not merely manage, no. He excelled! He was no manager, no; his events were run with military efficiency, and in his mind he was the Events Marshal, the charismatic leader and peerless tactician of the ongoing war with poor middle-management, disorganisation and the most hated, unpredictable, scheming and conniving enemy of all, the customers.

His events were works of art, he knew, grand gatherings of the rich and famous which had the guests returning home in utter amazement at the organisation and efficiency of the staff and service. He had, at one point in his life, had a friend of his describe the work he did as ‘corporate dos’; the Events Marshal had severed all contact with the despicable little man there and then and had never spoken a word to him since.

Now was the hour before battle. Soon the guests would arrive at the venue, the canvas on which he worked his art, service would begin and he would once again lead the charge, sallying forth under the banner of efficiency, discipline and organisation. Now, however, was the inspection, his duty to ensure that the troops under his command were prepared for the gruelling horrors of war.

He stepped forth onto the floor, adopting the strut that was so typical of him, chest thrust forth, head held high, emanating pride and dignity. He passed by two serving staff, and noted one of them quietly remark something to the other; no doubt, the Events Marshal suspected, some praise that the man was too modest to say to him directly for fear of causing embarrassment. The thought was a well-intentioned, if ridiculous one; the Events Marshal was far too dignified a man to ever feel something as base as embarrassment.

He stopped before an assembled parade of champagne glasses displayed on a table, arranged in a single neat square to be filled and taken by guests. Like a general looking over a phalanx of tiny glass soldiers ready to march at his orders, the Events Marshal surveyed them, heart filling with prised at the sight. Spotless, gleaming, absolutely…

The Events Marshal stopped his reverie. There, just off the centre. What was this? A surly, tattered dissenter amongst the troops! A smudge on one of the glasses!

Rage, shock, revulsion and righteous horror filled the heart of the Events Marshal at so terrible a sight. His eyes widened, his entire body quivered with a fury so awe-inspiring that it would have sent gods scurrying away to cower. Like the most psychotic of Sergeant Majors zeroing in on a hapless recruit, in that instant the glass became the focus of every dram of wrath that the Events Marshal could summon together.

One hand plucked it from the ranks, holding it before him as if this was an interrogation and the glass would somehow try and excuse itself for its most heinous of crimes. The Events Marshal turned it over, glaring at the offending smudge as if expecting the glass to cower before him. From his pocket he whipped a napkin, one kept in reserve for such emergencies, and in a single delicate movement, pinched the cloth between forefinger and thumb. In a few swift movements, the dissenter was polished and replaced back in the ranks, ready for duty.

The Events Marshal turned away from the formation, stalking across the hall, eye roving over it, searching for flaws as a predator would sight out the weak and old in a herd. For the moment, at least, he could see none, and true happiness washed across his mind.

He checked the watch, all of the clocks of the building synchronised with its tick, and nodded to himself. Soon, it would be time, he knew. Time to stand, time to deliver, time to serve.

Time to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of hospitality.

Story time, kiddies!

So, between replaying Deus Ex: Human Revolution, voraciously thumbing through the Shadowrun rulebook, watching Blade Runner, Akira and Ghost in the Shell and getting ever so slightly addicted to the trailer for CD Projekt Red’s upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077, I kind of ended up with an itch to write something cyberpunk-themed. This was the result, so do enjoy.

A Good Night’s Work

London was having a dry night, a rare thing for autumn.

Clouds were still hanging around the sprawl of skyscrapers that occupied its heart, monoliths of glass and glaring light, a forest of colossal shining trees with downy, pollution-laced water vapour as trailing, diseased foliage. Here and there, there were clearings, where the old buildings clung to life, surviving on their historical value alone as the hungry giants crowded around them.

Further away from London’s ever-beating heart and the city’s buildings began to grow lower, the heights sloping out as it began to reach the suburbs. Here and there they were broken by anachronisms of architecture; low, old buildings, often built from pollutant-scarred brick, or massive tower blocks spearing high into the sky, housing thousands. The streets were quiet with the nightfall curfew, the only vehicles moving on the streets being patrolling LENSE cars.

To the east of central London, near Thamesmead, on the bank of the River Thames, a man who went by the name of Winter was lying on the roof of a block of flats, a late 2020s construction with a metal and brick façade pitted and tarnished by acid rain. He had a sniper rifle in his hands, its butt pressed into his right shoulder, the weapon resting on a bipod, the tip of its barrel jutting out over the street below. He was watching two guards on the top of the building opposite, gangers in balaclavas holding cheap rifles, keeping a disinterested watch on the street below. They had no reason to be suspicious; this was Thamesmead under curfew, and so far on their month of taking watch the most interesting thing they had seen were passersby.

They paid no attention to the white van parked on the opposite side of the road to the building. They had no reason to; the vehicle was one of the many ubiquitous, universally despised vans that traversed London’s roadway every day, impossible to pick out from a crowd.

Had they bothered to inspect it closely they may have seen that this one was different. Beneath its anonymous white panelling was a layer of reinforced titanium alloy and carbon fibre helioweave, and the hydrogen engine in the bonnet was a custom-made one, able to deliver much more horsepower than the one the van had had in the dealership.

Within, there were four people. Waiting in the driver’s seat, ready to pulse the engine into life through neurolink command, Bentley Royce drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and amused himself by watching videos of cats on his Pupilvision.

Cortex: You should really be concentrating, Bentley, a line of text scrolled on his vision.

whatever jar, he shot back through the neuronet. got nuthin 2 do until we need 2 run

He grinned at the irritation that bled through the impeccable spelling and grammar of Cortex’s reply.

Cortex: Stay focussed, Bentley. I don’t want to be caught by LENSE just because you were too busy watching idiotic videos of animals.

relax jar itll be fine

In the back of the van, Cortex decided to leave the conversation there. Had he eyes, he would have rolled them at Bentley’s obnoxious choice of nickname, but as he did not he simply returned his attention to the wireless network of the building’s neurolinks. Cortex shared the back of the van with two others; Braveheart and Disraeli, armed to the teeth and equipped with their military-grade weapons, cybernetics and body armour. Cortex would not, and could not, join them; his own body was long gone, and he sat in the van as a brain within an armoured box, the spinal cord leading from it connecting to thousands of wires within its tank of amniotic fluid rather than an organic body. Constricted as he was, he danced through the cyberspace around the warehouse building, planting viruses in the neurolinks of its occupants in ready for activation at his command.

The final member of their group, Carnifex, was waiting in the wings, watching from an alleyway and ready to burst in through a side door. The silvery mask she wore, a blank theatrical one with its full lips faintly smiling, peered at the door from the shadows, the only colour she wore aside from the black-grey of her ablative bodyglove.

On the edge of his pupilvision, Disraeli could see their ready statuses were green, the squad’s signals across the TacLAN giving the good to go. One hand rested on the handle of the van’s door, the other on his assault rifle, and opened a link.

“Waiting on you, Winter,” he said into the squad’s comm..

On the rooftop, the marksman found his target. He exhaled, depressing the trigger.

A line of red blood, pulverised bone and jellied eyeball and brain matter flew from the left side of the head of the man in the scope, arcing across the rooftop like the unfurled petals of a madman’s flower. He fell, and his companion froze for a split second, casting around for the marksman in a semi-coherent panic. Winter shifted his aim and squeezed, the second round embedding itself in the man’s throat.

In the van below, Disraeli heard the sounds of rifle shots, even with the silencer affixed to its barrel. He glanced over at Braveheart, who nodded at him as she readied the shotgun she carried, pulled open the door and barrelled out into the street. He could see panicked silhouettes moving and flailing in the windows of the floors above as Cortex activated his viruses. The gangers would have a few moments of painful disorientation as their neurolinks and pupilvision lit up with a painful show of sound and light, and they would need to deactivate them before they could try doing anything else. As Disraeli and Braveheart moved, a glass pane shattered on a floor above and a wall was painted with blood as Winter fired once more.

They reached their target, the doorway they intended to breach through. It was a heavy thing, installed a few centuries after the construction of the Victorian building, thick, reinforced steel designed to hold against all but the heaviest of impacts, secured in place by heavy bolts and a lock. Braveheart span up her augmetic right hand, the robotic fingers wedging together into a drill. Pulverised chips of brick dust flew as she bored towards its hinges, smashing around the mortar and masonry that made up the far weaker part of the portal.

Orange powder coating the tips of her fingers, Braveheart stepped back to admire her handiwork as the augmetic returned to its default configuration, three holes punched through to the now-mangled hinges. Disraeli slammed his boot into the door, and like a felled tree it toppled inwards, clanging as it hit the concrete floor.

Both him and Braveheart burst in at the same moment, weapons up and sweeping the bare whitewashed room for hostiles; the only thing they saw was a table and a couple of chairs, and they moved to the next doorway.

“Carnifex, this is Disraeli,” he called across the radio. “We’re in; what’s your status?”

“I’m in,” Carnifex replied, wiping the blood off the blade of one of the knives she carried. A lazy coil of smoke wormed up from the barrel of one of the pistols mounted into the back of her wrists as she moved away from the three corpses. “I’m heading to the breakers now.”

“ETA on the power being out?”

“Two minutes. Carnifex out.”

Disraeli nodded to Braveheart and gestured to the door, and her metallic fist slammed into the handle. It flapped open like a shutter in a hurricane as Disraeli burst through, rifle in his shoulder. He saw movement in his vision, a figure turning to face the door, and his rifle snapped up. A squeeze of the trigger sent three rounds smacking into flesh, a yell of pain accompanying his collapse.

He moved towards the body, watching it as Braveheart moved in after him. The ganger wasn’t dead, hands clutching as slick puncture wounds, fingers fighting to staunch the flow of blood. He was moaning in pain, whimpering and sobbing, and he looked up at the impassive, helmeted visage of Disraeli as the mercenary loomed over him. He sniffed, snorting through tears and phlegm.

A snap, and Disraeli’s pistol ended his misery.

“We’re not going to have much time before the Mags get here,” Braveheart warned as the two hunkered next to the next door, her Scottish accent audible even through her helmet. “Let’s not waste it with drama, alright?”

“I know,” Disraeli said, resting a hand on the doorknob as Braveheart unhooked a flashbang grenade from the webbing she wore over her body armour. “You ready to breach?”

She nodded, and Disraeli pushed the door open as she pulled the pin, pressed the activation lever and threw it through. The door slammed shut once more, Disraeli waited for the crump, and burst through.

There was yelling and chaos within, and he sighted on a stumbling, baffled figure that was out in the open. He squeezed the trigger, sending the man reeling away to clutch at his side and scream, and snapped off a few more rounds at another of the warehouse’s defenders up on a balcony. They went wide, pockmarking the wall beside his target, and he ducked into cover behind a shelving unit as a few return shots from his enemies that were either quick or lucky enough to avoid the worst of the flashbang’s brunt began to hit the area around him.

He risked a peek around the corner. Vacant shelving on one floor and a balcony above them, seven or eight hostiles raining fire on his position. A ping sounded from next to his head and he ducked back, squeezing off a desultory burst from his rifle in order to try and force the enemy’s head down.

Darkness swept across the room like a blanket of black velvet. There were yells of confusion and the world became shaded with stark tones of blue-white as Disraeli activated his helmet’s night vision. He peeked back out of his cover now that the enemy’s rounds were going wide, switched his rifle to single shot and depressed the trigger. One man was hit in the shoulder, yelling and dropping his weapon to clutch at the wound, but the other two saw the flare of light from Disraeli’s shot and send rounds towards him.

He ducked back as the shots began to hit home once more, cursing as the occupants of the warehouse hammered fire towards him. He grunted as one thudded into the armoured shoulder of his bullet-proofed vest, as the flesh beneath it turned raw and painful. That was going to bruise.

A window shattered and one of the men on the balcony screamed as a bullet flew in from outdoors, Winter’s handiwork, forcing the heads of the two other gangers down. There was a brief lull as they tried to move out of the marksman’s line of fire, while another window exploded inwards in a shower of shattered droplets of ice.

“Cover me!” Braveheart called, scurrying forwards toward the gangers on the ground floor. Peeking out from his cover and ducking back a moment later as a round zipped past him, he could see none of them aiming for Braveheart as she moved. He had all of their attention, it seemed.

He poked the barrel of his rifle out, managing to squeeze off a few return shots, but it did nothing to force his enemy’s heads down; if anything it only gave them something to focus their fire on.

There was a boom of sound and a flare of light as Braveheart drew level with the enemy on the ground. Disraeli managed to see a man tumble to the floor, arm ripped from his shoulder by the weapon, and Braveheart stepped over him, squeezing the trigger once more. One of the men who had been alerted to her presence died in an instant as the spray of buckshot tore his skull in half, wet chunks of viscera flying across the room to land on the man next to Braveheart’s victim. He froze as he felt the warm spatter of blood, bone chips and brain matter land on him, and died in that instant as Braveheart squeezed the trigger a final time.

More gangers began to press into the room, yelling out into the confused darkness as the torches they carried bobbed and flashed with a schizophrenic fitfulness. Braveheart and Disraeli managed to take a few more down as they entered, but more managed to stumble in through the darkness and find somewhere to duck down and shoot back.

“Cortex!” Disraeli called into the radio. “Cortex, do the police know something’s going on?”
“They’ve got an ETA of five minutes, probably sooner if they send drones, which I reckon they will if there’s as much noise going on as this,” Cortex warned. “I’ve masked us from their scans but they’re just following the noise of the gunfire.”

“Alright, keep them blind as long as you can,” Disraeli said. “Bentley, start the engine and get ready to go.”

“Already done,” Bentley replied. “Hurry up, will you? I’m getting bored back here.”

Disraeli ignored him, and switched to Carnifex’s neurolink port.

“Carnifex, you hear me?”
Loud and clear Carnifex replied via text. Text communication had the potential to be distracting during a firefight, but she was currently in no position to speak.

“We’ve got five minutes tops to get this done,” Disraeli said. “Get that package ASAP, will you?”

On it. Will contact you when it’s done.

She returned her attention to the corridor below her, where the current quarry she was stalking had just passed underneath her. The balls of her feet were pressed against the walls on either side of the corridor and in a single movement she released, dropping down to land feet first behind her prey. The first one barely managed to turn around to face her before her knife whipped out and buried itself in his throat. The other one swung at the half-seen spectre with the butt of his rifle, but Carnifex turned past the swing and jabbed the metal tips of her fingers into his gullet. Gasping and choking, he stumbled back, sagging to his knees as Carnifex stabbed into the back of his skull with her knife, the titanium blade separating his brain from the rest of his spinal cord.

She set off down the corridor, footsteps ringing off the peeling whitewashed walls. She checked the ammunition readout of the two pistols mounted into the back of her forearms on her pupilvision, and nodded; no need to change the clips just yet.

From ahead of here, there was the sound of raised voices. No, a raised voice, somebody shouting at somebody else. She sampled and enhanced the voice from the espionage-grade audio equipment implanted in her ear canal, played back to her at a split second after she heard the muffled version.

“You don’t think I don’t know that they’re after it? Of course that’s what they’re here for! So you go out there and fuckin’ kill ‘em, you hear? I didn’t beef you up with all those chems and fancy tech so you could sit on your fat arse when trouble came around! Get the fuck out there and deal with this! I can look after myself.”

A different voice replied; “Yes boss.”

Carnifex frowned beneath her mask; so one of the gangers had got auged up, it seemed. Not surprising; considering how lucrative the drug operations the East End gangers ran were they had more than enough money to get some good tech.

There was the sound of a door opening and Carnifex swept around the corner, both wrist-pistols aimed, a knife held in each hand. The man that had stepped through the doorway and into her field of a vision was a giant, seven feet in height, bulging with muscle beneath his clothes. One metallic hand held an assault rifle, a massive blade was unfolded around the other and two lenses glared from his eye sockets right at Carnifex.

She fired, rounds slamming into him from her pistols, empty shell cases chiming on the floor around her. He jolted and shuddered as they hit, stumbling back a pace, and Carnifex only stopped when the weapons were exhausted of ammunition.

Her target was doubled over, and as Carnifex ejected the spent magazines from her wrists, he righted himself. His shirt was torn and bloodied, but in the gloom Carnifex could the gleam of metal beneath the wounds; sub-dermal ablative armour, an expensive piece of technology indeed.

“Fuckin’ bitch,” the man snarled, raising his assault rifle and firing.

Carnifex ducked away around the corner as soon as the weapon was up and firing, the reaction augmentation package she had had installed in her cortex saving her life as it did its work. The rounds shredded the corridor around her, but Carnifex was out of harm’s way for the moment.

The brute appeared the corner, the massive blade in his arm ready to swing at Carnifex. It slashed down as it saw her, but Carnifex ducked under the swing and caught the rifle as the augmented giant tried to bring it up for a point blank burst in her direction. She twisted, trying to disarm him, but all she managed to do was snap the weapon in two. Good enough.

She threw the heavy lump of metal at the man’s face and got a grunt of surprise, and she dodged away as he slashed at her with the bladed arm, springing back with a mechanical whir, landing gracefully a good fifteen feet away. Her enemy may have had augmentation work, but so had Carnifex; all four of her limbs were artificial improvements upon the ones she had been born with, and she had a fearsome array of sensory and nervous reaction suites surgically implanted in her brain. It was good, but right now she wasn’t sure it was enough.

For a moment, the two mechanically enhanced nightmares of human beings faced each other, before the augmented thug raised his weapon and charged. Carnifex dodged around and under his swing, turning to stab a knife into the back of her opponent. A massive mechanical hand closed around her wrist, and lifted Carnifex up, her enemy staring at her face to face.

She lifted her legs and kicked out, heels slamming into his midriff. Retractable blades sliced from each heel and slammed into his stomach, and she used the impact to propel herself away in a flip. She landed in time for her enemy to right himself, two more bleeding holes in his stomach and a snarl on his face.

With a roar, he charged, slashing at her with the blade. Carnifex spun away, dodged the punch that he sent swinging after her. She sidestepped to his outside as he stabbed at her with the blade and stabbed one of her daggers into the joint of the man’s elbow. Sparks crackled around the blade and the thug stepped back, forcing Carnifex away with a wild, uncoordinated swing, yelling in pain as the autoneurones built into the weapon went haywire.

He reached around with his other hand and wrenched the blade free, tossing it away, the knife skittering across the floor like a metal rat. There was a snarl of terrible, apocalyptic fury on his face, and he thundered straight towards her, bladed arm raised like a sword. He slashed down at Carnifex as he reached her but she ducked under the swing, tucking and rolling beneath him. The tip of the blade gouged out a chunk of the wall, but he turned and sliced at her again.

The assault may have been less coordinated, but the sheer ferocity forced Carnifex back along the corridor. She couldn’t block, she could barely dodge, and she didn’t have an opening to reload her pistols.

She suddenly dodged forwards, sticking close to one of the walls. Her opponent stabbed at her and she rolled around the blade as it slammed into the brick with a puff of pulverised paint and mortar. The brute swore as he tried to tug it free, Carnifex forgotten for a moment. That was all she needed, appearing behind him, remaining knife in hand. She grabbed his jaw and pulled his neck back, baring his throat and kissing it with the blade.

She left him there to collapse, one arm still embedded in the wall and blood creeping down his throat. She reloaded her pistols, picked up her other knife from where it lay discarded on the floor, and kicked down the door.

“What the fuck is – oh. Oh shit,” the portly man behind the desk managed to splutter as he saw Carnifex standing in the doorway. He had lit candles to illuminate the room, she noticed. “What do you want? What is it you want?”

“The hard drive,” Carnifex said, advancing on him, training a pistol on him. “Where is it?”

“In the safe,” he said, gesturing to the metal box in the corner. He caught the next look she gave him underneath her mask, and added; “The code’s four eight five nine.”

She crouched down next to the safe, one hand still pointing her pistol at him. A single finger tapped in the code and the heavy steel door swung open, to reveal the unassuming metal box within.

“Disraeli, I’ve got it,” Carnifex said, taking the hard drive that they had been sent to retrieve.

“About time,” Disraeli’s voice on the nuerolink had a mixture of relief and exasperation at Carnifex’s slowness on it. She wondered if he would appreciate her telling him of the augmented monster she had just had to deal with and decided that he probably wouldn’t. “Get back to the van, we’re bugging out.”

“Understood, Carnifex out,” she replied. She stepped towards the doorway, weapon still trained on the ganger boss, and added; “If you run quickly, you might be able to get out of here before LENSE arrives.”

With that she was gone, sprinting towards the window. She jumped, diving through an old window, curling into a ball to protect herself from the shards of flying glass and uncurling as she hit the ground. A normal human would have had their ankles snapped by the impact; that was of no concern to Carnifex.

She saw Bentley’s van, the back doors open. Disraeli was leaning out them, snapping off bursts at some of the gangers who had spilled out of the warehouse doors. Instead of going around them and risking being shot by her own side, Carnifex went up, leaping onto the roof and vaulting into the vans inside from there. Disraeli followed a moment later, slamming the door shut, and the engine roared and tires squealed as Bentley gunned the engine and pulled out down the road at full speed.

Bentley’s pupilvision lit up with the navigation overlay he had had installed on them, and he scanned the scanned route marker that ran along the map in the corner of his vision. He took a left, then a right, and raised an eyebrow as Cortex warned; “LENSE drones, heading down the street. Attack ones, too; they’re not messing around tonight, it seems.”

Bentley pulled the van in, killed the engine and ducked down as two silver machines hovered down the street, suspended amongst the upper storeys on whirling rotor blades, heavy-duty nonlethal weapons jutting from their stubby wings along the with barrels of a pair of machine guns. On the silver hulls of both of them, the word ‘LENSE’ was stencilled, and beneath that, ‘Law Enforcement and Neural Security Executive’. He watched them go through the windows, but they passed the van by without stopping, too intent on getting to their pre-programmed destination.

“We alright?” Disraeli asked from the back. Bentley waited a few moments, peering back out at the drones as they passed around the corner.

“Yeah, I think so,” Bentley said. He saw something flash up on the driving interface of the van and snorted. “Cheeky bastards just gave me a parking ticket.”

“Let’s just count ourselves lucky it was only a ticket,” Disraeli said as Bentley pulled out of the parking space and started driving once more.

“Fine, but I’m counting that as an expense,” Bentley said.

As he took to the road once more, heading in the direction of Peckham and stopping only once to pull aside and duck down from a pair of LENSE cars as they sped by, sirens screaming, Bentley grinned. They’d got the hard drive, got out of there whilst making it look like a standard hit on one group of gangers from another, and managed to get away without LENSE cottoning onto them.

A damn good night’s work indeed.

Metro 2033-A review

No, I’m not neglecting the blog! Shaddup!

So as part of my New Year’s Resolution to get the hell off Skyrim and play some of my back-catalogue of games that I’d bought but not completed, I fired up Metro 2033 not too long back in order to have some fun playing that; I’d got it for only a quid as part of the Humble THQ Bundle, and I’d heard good things about it, and having not done much past the tutorial before being suckered back in by Skyrim like the helpless junkie that I am, I decided I was actually going to get some willpower together and play the fucking game.

Based on a novel by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, of the same title, Metro is a post-apocalyptic survival shooter set in the Moscow Metro after a nuclear war that occured in 2013; the city above is destroyed in the war, and is soaked in radiation, suffering a nuclear winter and is populated only by ravenous mutants known as Dark Ones, with the surviving members of Moscow’s population retreating to the underground railway network. The  home station of Artyrom, the game’s hero, is suffering more and more Dark One attacks, and along with worrying rumours of a species of human mutants known as Homo Novis, is sent to the central Polis station in order to get help for his home station and combat the threat. Thus begins an epic quest across the stations of Moscow and even through the ruined, poisoned city above, as Artyom seeks to get help and save his station.

As is rather fitting for a post-apocalyptic game, a key part of Metro‘s gameplay is focussed on survival, with the need to scavenge bullets, med packs and filters for your gas mask being a constant one. While Artyom can slowly regenerate health instead of just having a healthbar, it only takes three or four bullets to put him down even on normal difficulty, and the game is a challenge even for a reasonably skilful FPS player like myself. I found myself having to rely on stealth and tactical thinking a lot more than I ever needed in FPSes like Call of Duty and Halo, but while’s its difficult, the designers had the sense to place plentiful checkpoints in order to stay on the fine line between challenging and frustrating; aside from one segment involving a bunch of mutants whose attacks basically involved swarming all around you in a colossal mob and then exploding, I kept the difficulty at normal and was still challenged throughout.

A special nod should go at this point to the game’s ingenious ammunition system; the assault rifles, which are the mainstay of Artyom’s arsenal, have two types of bullets that they can use, military rounds and home-made ‘dirty’ rounds. While military rounds are far more effective against enemies, they are also used as currency to purchase weapons, ammunition and health packs, and when you’re in the middle of a firefight and find yourself out of dirty rounds, you’ve got the painful choice of risking your neck to scavenge bullets from dead enemies whilst under fire or shooting some of your precious cash away.

The game also excels at worldbuilding and creating atmosphere; while it’s rather soft sci-fi in terms of the effects of radiation, Metro‘s setting still feels realistic and well realised. The inhabited town-stations feel like living, breathing places, whilst the gloomy tunnels of the metro, and the threat of running across their inhabitants, ranging from murderous mutants, murderous bandits, murderous Neo-Nazis and murderous Neo-Soviets (yeah, an overwhelming majority of the people you meet in this game will try and kill you) makes the game tense and atmospheric even in moments of downtime. The game also has some genuinely odd moments that border on the downright supernatural; the post-nuclear Moscow Metro is a strange place, it seems, with ghosts that are lethal to the touch which only appear by torchlight and ‘anomolies’ of ball lightning which can instantly kill the unwary traveller. The hallucinogenic interventions of the Homo Novis antagonists are some of the most genuinely wierd and memorable moments I’ve ever had in any game, and the climax of those evens had me looking at the screen, somewhat baffled, thinking ‘Christ that was wierd.’

The levels are large and detailed, and while they end up being rather linear, with there usually only being one right way to go, their sprawling nature means that you usually end up getting lost. With no map or objective markers it’s rather clear that the game is completely disinterested in holding your hand, which works rather well with the atmosphere and just how hard the game can be. It does seem rather hard to tell if the game is trying to be a survival horror game or not a points, though, as there are moments such as the Library which are genuinely scary, but much of the tense atmosphere it builds is used only standard action fare. It’s good action fare, don’t get me wrong, but it does make the taut feel the game has a points feel somewhat wasted.

The writing itself is pretty solid, and this is no doubt helped by the fact that Glukhovsky himself had a hand in development; while Artyom is a silent protagonist, whose only dialogue is to relate small chunks of exposition in the loading screens, the game is also populated by some memorable and reasonably well-rounded companion characters who assist and accompany you on your trip through the Moscow Metro. In combat, the AI companions were generally pretty useful but managed to not commit the cardinal video-game companion sin of stealing your thunder, but in the cutscenes this wasn’t so much the case; the game has a tendency to get Artyom trapped in some kind of difficult, inescapable situations, usually where he’s held at gunpoint, only for a third party to intervene and rescue him. Having this happen once would be fine, but it happens at several points throughout the game and it’s hard to feel like the hero of the story and Artyom the Badass Metro Ranger when you keep having to have your sorry arse rescued by somebody else.

And while the companion AI works pretty well, the same can’t really be said of the enemy AI. It’s not the worst I’ve seen in the game, but the human enemies you face are pretty goddamn thick, with no real coordination of fire and a tendency to run about like headless chickens in the middle of firefights. This in turn has a pretty negative impact on the stealth aspect of the game, as if you fail to instantly kill an enemy, every one of his squadmates will immediately know exactly where you are and will hammer your position with fire so accurate that I’m pretty sure they attached laser-guidance systems to their AKs. The mutant AI is pretty simplistic, with their tactics mainly involving running towards you and trying to claw your face off. That said, they are mutants so this hardly comes as a surprise.

For its faults, Metro 2033 is still a damn good game, and even if it’s rather old, is definitely worth picking up if you’re a fan of FPS games that are challenging and different, if you love the post-apocalyptic genre or if you just want to play a game that’s been put together by a team who were good at what they were doing and did with genuine passion.

Plus THQ would probably really, really appreciate you giving them some money right now.