2/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of Neo Cab.

My second Apple Arcade game. It was pretty awful. It is essentially a visual story, with the odd decision thrown in. There is very little interactivity - I happened to play the entire game using an Apple TV remote - you only ever click to progress the conversation and the odd swipe to choose things on a map. I can’t summon the energy to summarise the story. Suffice to say it is very dull. There’s a big bad evil company who some people are trying to take down, and you’re the innocent bystander swept up in it. The ‘reveal’ at the end was fairly predictable, the payoff underwhelming, and the overall experience left severely lacking. The entire game is played from within your Uber-style cab. The game consists of picking someone up, clicking through a conversation with them, and repeat. There are some fake-mechanics added in to make it feel like you have some control over it, but mostly these are pointless. In fact, I think pretty much every single action you have control over makes no difference to the game, not even your choices. I have never felt so passive in a game in my life. And that’s ok sometimes - I love an interactive story - but this game was trying to be more than it was, and it failed hard. An example is that some of the more ‘important’ conversation choices you get to make literally prevent you from selecting some of the options. You are shown a choice, but then forced to pick a particular one. It was so annoying. As you drive around, all you see is the same street. The same street, like you are driving round in circles, for the entire game. You never see anything else. Not only that, but the narrative describes a vibrant city full of upheaval, protests, parties etc. The game will literally have dialogue saying “your car is surrounded by people” while showing you a view out of the window of the same empty street you’ve been looking at for the last hour. Again, I don’t want to bash a developer for not being able to build a vivid cityscape in 3D, but to do that and then describe it as such while showing the complete opposite was just silly. It wasn’t all bad though. A lot of effort had clearly gone into the facial animations. I mean a LOT of effort - the facial animations were probably some of the best I’ve seen in an indie game ever. Given the game make a big thing about the portrayal of emotional states, this seemed like a sensible thing to get right. Also, the music was great. Music makes a big difference and the soft-yet-thumping soundtrack fitted really well. All in all, as you can probably tell, I think you can safely avoid this game!