SimulakrOS (PC)

Geoffrey Wright | February 5, 2025 | Mini Review | No Comments

With the holidays and plethora of new releases to start the year, there’s probably plenty of interesting games you may have missed a few months back. We’ll see if we can highlight some here, starting with Simulakros (spent more time over Xmas playing this than I’ll admit), a flashy rouge-lite by a solo developer at Sirio Games. Worth hacking in? Let take a quick look.

Corporations are out to build ultimate weapons, and one in particular looks to have finished work on their prototype – the Simulakros unit. As a hacker duo, its up to you and your friend to hack into the weapon in question remotely and escape the CORP. It won’t be easy as their AI looks to stop you,

As is usually the case for something like this, there isn’t a lore rich narrative to sink your teeth in – just a little something to give your mission context. There are some logs you can find on the occasional run, which can also be viewed on the menu, with each adding a little story here & there. There’s only really a few stages unfortunately, and a run doesn’t take too long, so there probably isn’t time to weave much of a story. It’s an interesting enough setup tho.

Graphically the game makes a great first impression. The colourful neon drenched early stage makes great use of UE5, the lumen lighting on full effect from the reflective surfaces. The neon stays in later stages but each has its own look that offers something different. Enemies are nicely modelled and each is unique enough that you can pick out in a crowd those to go for first. There’s plenty of

Audio is also good, there’s some decent voice acting, but its really the soundtrack you notice as it picks up in intensity as the shooting starts. You do pay for all this goodness with performance, the game can be tough to run. I had to drop to 1440p with DLSS on my system (R7 5800X3D/32Gb/RTX 3090) to keep the framerate high at max settings, couldn’t really get it to pass 100 fps unfortunately. Still, even 60 should be fine and there’s plenty to tweak to get a solid lock on that.

The game pretty much nails the fast paced shooter rogue-lite angle it goes for. You’ll be blasting your way through waves of enemies and exploring the stages, though the layout and item placement is randomised each run, looking for upgrades and any intelligence from the corporation. to build yourself up enough to tackle the end stage stage boss and beyond. It takes a couple of runs to get a full grip on things as you build up your level and upgrades to finally beat an obstacle and move forward, once done new enemies etc are introduced which restarts the cycle again.

The 3 characters on offer each have their own weapons & abilities, and generally play differently enough. To further that each has their own neural connection (skill/ability tree) to further customise, and then there’s the random abilities you collect during a run to add further tweaks – these reset but can be potent with the right mix. Yeah ok there’s not loads to customise, and the colour unlocks can be brutal, but there’s enough there to keep you coming back for a blast often enough and experimentation is fun.

Simulakros is a little deceptive as a solo dev project. It can look surprisingly great, plays pretty well, and has enough about it to tap into that ‘one more go’ appeal. Unfortunately its pretty short, only a few stages, with little outside of the gameplay or presentation to draw you in. Still, its a cheap & cheerful price, with regular enough updates, so may be worth a try if you just wanna skilfully blast some bots.