Developer: Ragiva Games
Publisher: Black Shell Media
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Cyborg Rage – Review
We’ve featured a fair share of bullet hell games on the site, often the side scrolling type, with Stardust Galaxy Warriors being one of the most recent ones. Stardust Galaxy Warriors followed the path that many indie developers take but added its own quirks, humor and graphical style in the process. Today Cyborg Rage will pass the revue but not with flying colors. We assumed we were diving into a very generic space adventure and well, we were pretty much completely right. Prepare yourselves, not for action packed gameplay, but a lack of content to keep things interesting.
Story
In the distant future Humanity’s military choices have come back to bite us in the ass, as one of our biggest weapons has turned on us. In the past many cyborg vessels were created and replicated to be sent to the frontlines, to protect all that is holy to us. Sadly, for some reason they developed some sort of a hive mind, and this new sentient being decided it would be best to attack us rather than defend us. It’s up to you to end this scourge.
Truth be told, while normally a simple and tacky story such as this would work perfectly for a game like this, the presentation of it is simply horrendous. While the voice acting itself is a quite nice touch to the overall storytelling, it’s the black screens with white text that make the story lose whatever appeal it could have had. Vague descriptions, often only one phrase in length are simply meaningless and look like loading screens that have gone awfully wrong.
Graphics
Even though the game does not look extremely bad, it does look like everything is a blast from the past and an incoherent one at that. The models for both the allied and enemy spacecrafts look detailed and have bland coloring, all being 2D models that show no signs of depth and volume. Sadly, the game itself only offers three allied models and a handful of enemy ships, making it seem like the developers gave up after developing the first two levels of the game.
Then come the backdrops, which are of a completely different style, often resembling aquarelle paintings, that simply don’t properly match the moving vessels onscreen. Also, these backgrounds have a sudden drop in quality and make things seem that much cheaper than it could have been. The coloring of said backdrops is a lot brighter and seems to come from a totally different palette than the ships.
Seeing the game is pretty much a bullet hell game, a lot of bullet fire will be seen on the screen, but everything is quite generic and simple, yet for a game such as this, it does the trick, while never adding something new to the equation.
Sound
At the beginning of the game we were quite hopeful that this game actually immediately presented us with fitting music and rather decent voice acting in the story mode. This feeling immediately began to fade away when the music kept repeating itself over and over again and awkward pauses were embedded in the different dialogues the game has to offer. While things never get truly terrible, the lack of diversity and no fluency in the dialogues simply makes it mediocre, while this could have been one of the game’s strongest assets.
Gameplay
Cyborg Rage is a side scrolling ‘bullet hell’ game, but one with very limited options and the absence of things that actually make games like this fun. Nonetheless, you’ll be occupying yourself with blasting nasty cyborgs out of orbit, while you defend the human race.
To keep things simple, the game only has two options when it comes to the single player modes, namely the campaign and separate matches. The first offers you a flimsy story, where you’ll be stuck with the spacecraft the game shoves you in and presto. The matches are also pretty much the same, but you can choose your vessel and they offer you credits and allow you to rank up after several successful missions. Ranking up only allows you to buy new spacecrafts that look the same as your other ones, and merely replace them, as they are the ‘upgraded’ versions of the older one. Sadly, Even after several upgrades, there was no noticeable difference except for draining my money to unlock them.
Even though you’ll only encounter a handful of different enemies, the control scheme makes sure you’ll need some time to adjust to things. Rather than keyboard or controller support, this game relies solely on your mouse, meaning you will have to navigate your combat cruiser by moving your cursor around. Of course your ship only has a fixed speed, thus moving rapidly with your mouse will make the ship move with a bit of delay. While these controls might feel a bit odd at first, it’s a very pleasant way to play when you get the hang of it, especially seeing your ships starts to fire automatically (basic attack) when enemies are closing in. The game only requires three buttons, namely your mouse buttons (and wheel) and each represent an attack, shield, heal or other power-up. Your three buttons are represented in your HUD with a percentage, clearly showing which of these skills is still recharged. Overall a fun way to play the game, even though it has certain limitations you wouldn’t have with a controller or keyboard, namely an actual complex scheme.
Sadly, the way you control the game also has a huge disadvantage as you’ll never be able to play local co-op this way. While the game does offer an online multiplayer mode, which is a rare and commendable feature for games such as this, the lobbies are simply deserted. It would have been great if there was controller support to allow for local multiplayer, which would have already boosted the likeability of this game. That being said, at least you’ll have a slightly retarded AI friend to back you up in battle.
Last but not least, this game lacks pretty much all the fun features other bullet hell games have, as there are no actual upgrades or power-ups to be found. Ok, you can switch between three vessels, all with their unique powers and abilities, but you’ll never be able to actually properly upgrade them (even though you can, it simply does nothing). Other games in the genre often grant you temporary boosts in the levels themselves or even the chance to buy new parts afterwards, to allow some sort of customization. (You can change the colors of the ship though, huzzah!)
Also for some reason the game spasms out when we press the escape button, an issue that has been addressed within the game’s community, but it seems the developers simply don’t want players to pause their game, in levels that randomly vary in length, and often last too long.
Conclusion
Cyborg Rage tries to milk dry a Milky Way of similar games, even though it might just become the next groundhog day, seeing you’ll be stuck doing the same thing over and over again, with no actual goal you can reach. While the overall base and control scheme are ‘decent’, it feels like the developers simply gave up after successfully scripting the first levels of the game, hoping to earn some money with delivering a minimum of effort in return. This game should have been a work in progress, that could have been decent, but as it currently stands it should either drop its asking price drastically or revamp pretty much everything.
Cyborg Rage - Review,
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