Do androids dream of electric sheep?
There is something to be said about delays in the video game industry. They happen all the time from the biggest hits to indie upstarts. Take the game Replaced, announced at E3 in 2021 it showcased a cyberpunk style environment. With some slick-looking melee combat and a graphical style all-its-own it very quickly became one of my most anticipated titles. Mind you I based this solely on a flashy trailer and I used my imagination to fill in the gaps. That was probably a mistake on my part, as Replaced isn’t what I thought it was going to be, but does that mean it’s bad?
In the world of Replaced players will be transported to an alternate reality where the US denoted nuclear bombs on its on soil instead of Japan at the end of WW2. The game itself is set in 1984 in a world that very much resembles Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner films, even the main character Reach is wearing a long coat much like Rick Deckard’s. Funnily enough this game also involves A.I. but instead of hunting it, you are the program. Reach is an A.I. program who due to a lab accident ends up replacing “haha like the games title” one of its creators who was working late. By inhabiting the body of Warren Marsh, Reach has free will and self-awareness and routinely will address Warren after doing certain actions.
MSRP: $19.99
Platforms: Xbox (reviewed), PC
Price I’d Pay: $19.99
The game opens as I said with an accident and Reach escaping to Phoenix City, before getting there though Reach is considered one of the “disposal”, these are members of society who have had organs harvested from them for the wealthy before themselves being “disposed” of over the wall. This class warfare has inevitably bred a rebellion, and Reach is quickly drawn up into the conflict. After being introduced to the leaders of the movement by your new friend Tempest he shows them why Reach would be an ally, and that is due to the fact that he is the only one with a working gun. See in this timeline the guns are all DNA coded like in Judge Dredd and just as in that movie the pistol here has two forms.
The pistol can transform into a melee baton that players will use for most of the combat. Utilizing a Batman: Arkham-style type of combat, players will use X for melee and Y for counterattacks. As they fight, they will kinetically charge up their gun which can be used for some pretty cool looking finishing moves. There is also a pickaxe with can be used with the B button, this is utilized to break enemy armor so that they can actually be damaged. This is where the game starts to come apart for me, yes, it is flashy and looks really cool but it feels very sluggish in practice. It doesn’t help matters that the moves themselves are limited and with no sort of skill tree or upgrade system; combat just ends up being repetitive.
Replaced is a lower paced game to be sure, I was thinking that it feels an awful lot like a new age version of ‘Flashback’ from the 90’s. Funnily enough I read an interview with the developers that talked about how that was one of their influences and it shows. I don’t mind a slower pace but Replaced doesn’t even have a run button. Reach will spend most of the game at a jogging pace which makes exploring the maps a bit tedious. But I would encourage you to explore them as players will run into a host of side characters who will have quests for Reach that will reward him with med-stim upgrades, health upgrades and more.
Now I wanna talk about the negatives I have with Replaced, but first I want to address the fact that I started my gameplay on the Steam version and finished on the Series X. There is an extremely noticeable difference between the two versions, which is why the game itself is scoring so high; because 99% of the reviews are being done on the PC which is the superior version. While playing the Steam version I had some small issues like black screens after a cutscene, some freezing and slowdown but nothing game breaking. Now when I boot up the Xbox version, I am met with the standard user license agreement only where it should tell me to press X to accept and B to disagree there is the words ‘Glyph not Found” It was at this moment that I knew, I was in for some BS.
And so it was; that every single time there was a pop-up in the game to press a controller button it would just tell me ‘Glyph not found’ Now this wasn’t a problem at the beginning because as I said, I started on PC so I knew which buttons I needed. But once I got to a point that I hadn’t been I was told I needed to press ‘glyph not found’ to use the pickaxe to make a jump. So, there I was, trying and failing to make this jump and pressing every button on my controller until I finally found it was the B button. This is inexcusable for multiple reasons, but what makes it worse for me is that this issue is only on Xbox and since all the reviews are PC this hasn’t been highlighted. Sure, Sad Cat Games as the developer can patch and resolve this issue but for a game that has been delayed numerous times, I don’t understand why we didn’t take more time to ensure these things are fixed.
Then here is the presentation of the game, the visuals are absolutely gorgeous. The light and shadow at play, the rain slicked visuals; Replaced is a game that simply oozes a moody aesthetic. But for as good as it looks, the audio is so underwhelming it’s ridiculous. The game features no voice acting and I think it really suffers greatly for it. Early on players will meet Victoria who has given up her larynx, this is only found out after Reach makes a comment about her sounding like a machine. I’m sure it was for budget reasons, but I just really feel like this game is missing something not having voice acting, the many conversations that Reach has with Warren would be amazing to hear instead of just read on the screen.
Replaced didn’t turn out to be what I thought it was, nevertheless, I enjoyed its narrative and the things it had to say about A.I; given where we are in 2026 it felt pretty timely. I did have some small graphical issues on PC but the fact that the Xbox version is not capable of telling players what buttons to press in order to be successful is just crazy to me. I should not have to spend 10 minutes of trial and error to figure out a mechanic that the game should display in the tutorial. For a game that has been delayed so many times it’s these kinds of bugs that are just simply a bad look for the developer. There is some fun to be had with Replaced on Series X but I would wait for a patch or two before I began to go looking for it.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
