REPLACED review

It took me less than a minute to fall in love with the art style and atmosphere of REPLACED, Sad Cat Studios’ long-awaited 2.5D action platformer. It took me less than an hour to run into the mechanical problems that held it back from being truly memorable. It’s not all bad, but with a bit more testing and balancing it could have been a lot better.

I’d been excited for this one since it was first revealed back in 2021, enough that I rewatched both Blade Runner movies the weekend before to get into that ’80s tech-noir mindset. After just over 10 hours, here’s where it succeeds and where it needed more polish.

A world you’ll stop and stare at

The first thing you notice is how much care went into the art direction and world-building. There are plenty of good-looking 2D indie games these days, but in REPLACED I kept stopping just to take in the detail: glowing neon, rain-soaked alleyways, dark snowy woods, and smoggy cities lit red by murderous drones hunting you. It’s phenomenal to look at, and the cinematography is so carefully crafted that it sometimes feels like a movie.

The story

In this alternate 1980s, society lives on both sides of a giant wall. Inside, people work and live under the watchful, authoritarian rule of Big Tech and strict law enforcement, while others, called disposables, donate body parts.

You play as programmer Warren Marsh, who is working with an AI system called R.E.A.C.H. until a catastrophic accident lets the AI into Warren’s mind and gives it control of his body. After a daring escape you end up lost outside the walls of Phoenix City, in a world of gangs, escaped donors, open violence and squalor. R.E.A.C.H. has to navigate a world it doesn’t understand to get back to the lab and separate itself from Warren’s body.

What starts as a simple story grows over the course of the game into human cruelty, class war over healthcare, AI awakening and more, so R.E.A.C.H. feels far more human by the end. The linear levels take you from sewers and wilderness to crumbling cities and rooftops. There’s plenty of lore and optional side missions if you read what you find, and the music makes the whole thing feel like pulp noir sci-fi cinema. I’d happily watch a movie version.

Platforming: precise, and clunky

The gameplay splits into two parts: platforming (walking, jumping, climbing, and later hacking electronics) and combat. Both show a lot of promise, and both frustrated me.

Most of the platforming is simple. The problem is a few sequences that demand precise jumps or careful stealth, where being spotted can mean instant death. Jumping while running takes an extra moment to respond because of the character’s animation, so you have to press early. Get the timing wrong and you’ll trip and fall on your face, even over a fallen log or a box. There’s also a delay when you jump onto a wall and need to change direction before jumping again. More than once I felt I was dying because of clunky controls rather than my own skill. Slightly quicker animations would have made a big difference.

Combat: Arkham-style, until it isn’t

REPLACED takes a lot of inspiration from the Batman: Arkham games. You’re attacked by groups of enemies that each need a different approach. You counter one enemy while dodging another’s uncounterable attack, deflect bullets (a white aim line turns red right before you need to dodge or reflect), and keep moving around the arena. Bigger enemies have shields or armor that have to come off with special weapons before you can hurt them.

When you get into the flow it’s exciting and genuinely fun. But by the end of the game you’re using every button, both bumpers and both triggers, in every fight, and with the slow animations my fingers often couldn’t keep up. Groups of enemies overwhelmed me quickly.

The worst offender is the move that strips shields and armor. It needs a short charge while you hold the button, plus a precise distance from the enemy. Against one enemy it works. With six or more attacking you, the fight stops being challenging and fun and becomes frustrating.

Two more things made it harder than it needed to be:

• No button remapping on console. Going from a counter to a dodge to an attack, let alone deflecting shockwaves or gunshots, always felt awkward to me. Being able to remap dodge and counter alone would have helped a lot.
• Very few heals. I played on Normal (there’s Easy, Normal and Hard). I found extra health upgrades, but only three heals in the whole game. That makes the final fights extremely tough, especially in the last two levels, where save points force you to fight the same groups of enemies over and over.

Verdict: stunning world, frustrating gameplay

I can see the love poured into every frame of REPLACED, and I enjoyed its characters and storytelling. But its combat and clunky platforming take away from what could have been a standout game. I wish the developers had put that same love into the gameplay and accessibility: button remapping, smoother animations, and difficulty settings that scale better. As it stands, the uneven combat turned what could have been a brilliant system into fights I couldn’t wait to get past.