Moody cyberpunk “Tech-Noir Tactics” All Walls Must Fall is now free to keep on Steam

Time hopping in Berlin usually means queuing several hours for a club, only to magically find yourself either right back at the end of the line, or else waking up on the U-Bahn three days later with tinnitus and currywurst spilled down your Acronym jacket. Not so in cyberpunk tactics game All Walls Must Fall. Here time travel means dodging bullets, reversing flubbed hacking, and replaying that conversation you had with the bouncer that got you booted to the curb. “A bloody good time-troubling tactical shooter,” decreed Adam Smith (RPS in Peace) in his review. Well, now it’s a bloody free time-troubling tactical shooter. Take that, Monday!

“When you love something - set it free,” wrote designer Jan David Hassel in one of the better LinkedIn posts that popped into my feed over the weekend. Usually, the site tends to attract the sort of post decrying anything free as not worth having in between detailed routines that involve waking up at 11:59pm the previous day and drinking the blood of freshly slain spreadsheets, so this is a comparative win.

Set in Berlin in an alt-future 2089 that never saw the end of the cold war, All Walls Must Fall casts you as a cyborg-armed, suspenders-wearing, bearded bear of an operative, cyber-sleuthing and cyber-murdering your way through a series of techno clubs. It plays out somewhere between turn-based classic roguelike and real-time, and you can rewind actions to perfect them. After each level, you can watch a replay of your actions to a pulsing techno beat. It’s very stylish and very smart.

“Think of it as a snapshot though, a malleable freeze-frame that captures one aspect of life in a particularly gleeful cyberpunk dystopia,” wrote Adam. “By framing an entire world through the lens of an never-ending party, All Walls Must Fall creates a sense of claustrophobic, anarchic bliss. A final ecstasy before the flames. As long as you're aware of the limitations and can endure a few false steps, that's worth the price of entry.” Of course, the price of entry is now free, so time has rendered this entire review obsolete - as is the fate of all games journalism that suffers from minor factual errors, even in retrospect. If you want to defy the inherent cruelty of linear chronology, though, you could do a lot worse than strapping on your suspenders for a bit of cyber-clubbing.