Cloudpunk review – delivers the goods

As a delivery driver in a Blade Runner-style landscape, the thrill is to dip into client's lives. Just don't ask what's in the package

The city of Nivalis is, at once, arrestingly beautiful and awkwardly familiar. With its streaking hover cars and pink-humming katakana signs, the sparkling rain and homeless androids, it's a cliche that invites cliches: sprawling", neon-lit", Blade Runner-esque". Still, overfamiliarity with the aesthetic does little to blunt the fierce appeal of Cloudpunk's game world.

In part that's because this is a world constructed from tiny pixelated building blocks, which give the city and its distinct districts the feel of a basement Lego project that got wildly out of hand. As you sweep across its glowing vistas, weaving in, out, over, and under the local traffic, the tumbling blocks of houses below appear to plead to spill their secrets. The buzz when you first realise you can park up and gather them up on foot is exhilarating. But Cloudpunk also slips the constraints of its genre by virtue of its casting: you play, not as a monosyllabic hacker trying to topple a megacorp, or as an ex-cop trying to win back his badge, but as that humble hero of the hour: the delivery driver.