Instead, Paradise Cracked is straight-ahead cyberpunk. A hacker known as, well, Hacker stumbles across a mysterious packet of information, and soon after must escape from aforementioned totalitarian police. He's got a gun and the clothes on his back - not enough to crack the case, obviously. Good thing this is an RPG; soon enough you've got a party of dispossessed types acting as soldiers for hire.

What's interesting is that Paradise Cracked is a turn-based strategy RPG very reminiscent of the X-COM games. At a time when real-time rules over all, you've got to give credit to any company willing to remind folks just why turn-based games are fun. You can't just rush into battle - you have to plan shots, open lanes of fire, find places to hide between turns. Why all the emphasis on combat actions? Well, Paradise Cracked is heavy on the combat.

Very heavy. Missions generally involve fighting to a certain location, killing someone and fighting back. Even delivery missions mean blasting through waves of hostiles. That's sort of a shame. I was hoping for more William Gibson than Road Warrior, with frequent trips into cyberspace, that sort of thing.

Still, Paradise Cracked is a lot of fun. I find myself with "one more turn" syndrome, where one more turn becomes 10 and then hours pass.

A couple of complaints. First, it takes long periods of time to level up. The point of leveling in an RPG is to give the player some sort of emotional investment: You're guiding each PC toward your own ends, whether it's a group of supersoldiers or a well-rounded party or whatever. By the time the first level-up came in Paradise Cracked, I had actually forgotten the characters could be molded.

Also, the translation work ranges from good to laughable. Look, if I tried to write this article in Russian, the folks at MiST would be rolling on the floor. Instead, I'd hire someone fluent to do a good job. As it is, I try to avoid reading any text in the game, lest I be jolted back to reality. I must note here that the voice-acting is actually quite good, and mercifully deviates from the on-screen text so as to sound natural.

In fact, the sound and music as a whole are good; the latter ranges from trance to, especially during battle, metal.

As for graphics, while the 3D engine works well, I was surprised at the lack of a cyberpunk feel. Don't get me wrong; you've got your perpetual-night cityscapes and your blasted urban wastelands. But the overall feel is more Fallout (post-nuclear civilization held together with found items) than William Gibson (with sleek, omnipresent computers). Minor problems, I know, but atmosphere counts for a lot in this genre.

In the end, Paradise Cracked is more geared toward fans of the Fallout games looking for a fix, and X-COM devotees mourning the lack of new entries in that venerable series. It's definitely a "just one more turn" game, but it's not going to revolutionize the genre.