This year’s Gamescom: Open Night Live was a packed show with some great reveals, but for me, above the rest was Lynked: Banner of the Spark.
The easy-to-understand pitch is that Lynked is the gameplay fusion dance of Animal Crossing and Hades. It sounds like a wild combination on any other day. The developer’s execution works out as Lynked is an enjoyable roguelite RPG with farming and town-building elements ever-enhanced by its Nintendo-like cartoon art style. For the most part, I had a lot of fun with Lynked’s early access build.
AAA to Indie with a Speilberg at the Helm
Lynked comes from Fuzzybot, a new indie studio of former DICE LA developers formed in 2020 during the pandemic. At the project’s helm may be a [last] name you recognize. Max Speilberg, Steven Speilberg’s real-life son, is leading Lynked’s vision as creative director, a first-time position for him in the industry. As a graphic designer, Max has previously worked on AAA games like Assassin’s Creed Unity and Battlefield 1. The game’s publisher is Dreamhaven, a new developer formed by Blizzard co-founder Mike Morhaime, which was interestingly founded around the same time as Fuzzybot.
I wouldn’t say Lynked’s story is Fuzzybot’s main focus, as the narrative feels like a means to get to what matters: the gameplay. The first minute and a half of the exposition is a commentary on current technology. In the game’s world, the age of AI is happening much like our own in the mysterious modern year of 20XX. Still, not all things are that great on the surface, as the energy to handle the technology negatively impacts the planet as Earth’s environments begin to collapse.
AI Destroying the Planet Doesn’t Sound so Fictional
Unbeknownst to anyone, AI technology continues to evolve in the background of the devastation as the planet’s horrible, not-so-natural disasters continue. A Unibot, a robot with AI intelligence, is created. This little guy is programmed to build more Unibots like itself and help heal the planet. Over time, with five Unibots at the ready, they formed the “Banner of the Spark,” a league of Unibot heroes to continue the work of their creator.
After that, we get one massive time skip. In the year 30XX, the original Unibot, feeling its work pointless in the past thousand years, turns its back on humanity and decides to build a new world order for itself; what a heel turn. As the game’s villain mastermind, it creates a death army of robots known as Combots, taking out the world’s only hope, the Banner of the Spark and scattering them to the wind.
A Buddy Ready in Arms Length
That’s not truly the end. No, not by a long shot, as players are inserted into the shoes of one of the last remaining remnants of humanity. As the player avatar, you are being held captive in a Combot Empire prison facility with no way out. As you wake up in your cell, you see a Unibot as the game’s Hades perspective shines through for the first time. After waking them up, your robot cellmate is shocked to see you and says he’s been looking for you. Your new robot pal introduces themself in an adorable Banjo-Kazooie-like gibberish-sounding dialogue as Inerspieces Liason Unibot model BU-D118 or Buddy for short.
With the two of you together, Buddy reveals they can break out of their prison cell but only together as a team. To do this, you literally have to lend him a hand as Buddy merges onto your avatar, overtaking their upper limb and transforming into a robotic arm. Now that you’re “lynked” up, you can use your new appendage’s Wyre, a grappling hook that lets you grab the cell door and tear it off.
Can Anyone Hear the Prison Break Theme Playing?
This first sequence serves as a tutorial; the game’s robotic enemies quickly rush at you while learning some of the game’s mechanics. The game first focuses on the Wyre in combat. You can use Buddy’s grappling hook to grab items scattered around the map and throw them at any enemies in your way. That’s not all, as the game has a variety of enemy sizes, so smaller enemies are fair game to chuck at enemies. During this, you’ll run into “Goodbot,” another member of your Unibot party who flies you to the next area,
That’s not to say you can’t use your grappling hook on regular enemies, but you have to wait for the “Wyre” symbol to pop up so you can use it. That’s only a tiny slice of combat as your character later picks up their first weapon in the tutorial; this is where the real game begins. With the sword in hand, you can damage enemies as you can figure out the playstyle and pattern the game is going for. Alongside attacking, you can use dodge rolls to avoid attacks, a metered super attack based on the weapon class you have equipped, and the spark powers you’ve earned through the game’s skill tree.
After you break out, Lynked introduces you to the Animal Crossing portion of the game. You make it to an open area where players will slowly build out their town. Like in Animal Crossing, you can mine for resources from trees (wood, apples, and accounts), minerals (ore, rare earth and gold), recyclables (aluminum, plastic, and glass), and more. The villagers are the Unibots you rescue in some of Lynked’s 24 campaign missions across four chapters.
Building a Town While Rescuing One Bot at a Time
After talking to them in the home hub, they’ll give you their building, which you can place anywhere on the map and move around anytime through the game’s free-flow Byld+ mode. These shops will let you buy or sell items in the general shop, have a blacksmith create new weapons or enhance your weapon class abilities, craft items, buy seeds for planting, and more. Alongside that, you can do some side activities in town, including capturing these little robots, bit bots that run around the town hub and killbots, robotic fish you can fish for, both of which need timing, but after you capture them, players can use them for crafting.
You won’t just rescue shop owners but residents, too. They’ll populate your village, and as they walk around, you can complete easy quests to earn small rewards that help increase your friendship level with them. None of that happens until you go out on missions. As you select one through the mission board, Goodbot will fly you to basecamp, where you can choose which weapons and spark powers you want in your loadout. Additionally, there is a battleground where players can practice their combos on Unibot dummies. As you rescue Unibots, they’ll be here ready to help you get ready.
Smithy Comes In Clutch
The most important of which is Smithy, the blacksmith Unibot, who can either level up your weapon stats or add a randomized stat, but these are not permanent and will only apply to this mission, meaning you’ll start all over again when you start the next one. If that all sounds familiar, the missions are where the Hades roguelite part of the game comes into play, as you can adjust your character before you get into the thick of it.
After you’re ready, Goodbot will take you to the first area. In the upper right corner of the game’s UI, combat is divided into multiple regions. Sometimes, they can be as low as four, but other times, it can be slog going as high as ten. To progress, you need to remove every robot enemy in any given area, which ranges in difficulty with the number of enemies and variety you’ll need to fight, so pace yourself.
Enemies will leave behind scrap, which you can redeem in your run to open chests to get health items or weapons. If you don’t like the weapon, it’s no problem; you can trash it to get a little scrap. Lynked gets more challenging whenever you run into a boss at the end of any mission. They can range from a supped-up version of enemies you’ve already faced with a larger health pool and barrier shield that disappear after a few hits. Actual bosses will show up in the more important missions, which were challenging and had me sweating a bit.
An Air Dash Would Be Nice
Honestly, the gameplay is pretty solid, and there is an excellent loop to it that anyone picking up the game can get a lot out of. As someone who has played both of Lynked’s inspirations, I feel that the game isn’t on their level, and that’s OK, as Lynked feels it’s trying to do its own thing. However, it would feel better if Lynked had an air dash, as the dodge and roll feel slow in action, and I want to zip around the field when the going gets tough.
Lynked was released in early access, so a few problems were noticeable when I got my hands on the game before its launch. I played Lynked mostly on my Steam Deck; the game is currently unverified in its early days. Lynked had noticeable performance issues, leading to the frame rate dipping between 10-30 FPS. With the game set to high settings by default, I immediately lowered it, which helped a bit, but the issue would still come up in rare moments, specifically whenever my character entered a new area.
Technical Issues Are Being Fixed in Less Than a Week After Early Access Launch
Lynked is in development, and the first major update was released on its early access date. After I installed it, the performance was more solid, as the gameplay was consistently in the 40 FPS range, with no noticeable frame stuttering afterward. That’s not to say that the issues were resolved, as a new minor problem hit the game, and the update took a hit on the game’s environments. Before the update, the grass was well detailed, but after, it just looked like a green smudge placeholder I’m walking across in the game.
As I write this, FuzzyBot released a massive 7 GB update that helps fix my grass issue. The detailed grass is popping up again, although it’s loading in a specific area rather than the whole town. I’ve been hunkered down, playing and writing my Lynked review, so I haven’t sent any feedback to FuzzyBot. Although I guess I don’t have to, the developer has been doing a good job reacting fast to its Steam community’s issues with the game. I’d expect these types of fixes a little bit later, but now the game is in much better shape on the technical side than when I started playing it.
Single-Player Difficulty is Unbalanced
Probably my biggest complaint is that Lynked has a massive balancing issue. For anyone who has played Lynked as a single-player game, it’s challenging to get through as a solo experience. The reason is that the game is built as a co-op roguelite, so the enemies you face are the same ones three players in co-op will face. I dealt with this and only got through the game, mainly using the healing spark powers that give your character 40 to 60 HP every few minutes, depending on how much you level up the skill.
When my character was at its lowest, I waited a long time to fully heal it before progressing to the next area, which accumulated my playtime past the 30 to 40-hour mark, with my Steam Deck running the game while I did something else. I wouldn’t advise anyone to go with this approach as it made the game more tedious, but the camping strategy helped me get through it. I know there is an offline mode in the works that might alleviate the issue, but I did need it to have an easier time with the game.
Lynked: Banner of the Spark so far is a solid execution of a vision inspired by Animal Crossing and Hades, with a fun cartoony art style that invokes many people’s favourite Nintendo games. The gameplay, while good, doesn’t feel like it’s at the final form level yet, as the fun doesn’t feel like it’s genuinely there yet, especially when the difficulty in co-op slips into the single-player experience.
In this modern era, many games have technical issues right out of the gate, so seeing them pop up for Lynked is to be expected. However, this being an early access game, knowing about them now will help in the lead-up to FuzzyBot’s first full release, so it’s best to get them out of the way now. FuzzyBot has something special in its hands, but it’s up to them to listen to their community and adjust to make a good game even better. If they can, then Lynked: Banner of the Spark is a game I can see myself returning to.
[The publisher provided a copy of the game for early access purposes.]
Reviewed on: PC
