- DEVELOPER: Megame LLC
- PUBLISHER: Megame LLC
- PLATFORMS: PC
- GENRE: Looter / Shooter
- RELEASE DATE: August 20, 2024
- STARTING PRICE: 14,79 €
- REVIEWED VERSION: PC
CyberCorp is a top-down shooter game that combines looting, cyberpunk aesthetics, and fast-paced isometric gameplay with co-op features. It has some good ideas but also has issues that hold it back. You play as the Agent, a former worker of the shady CyberCorp, now trying to reveal its wrongdoings. Using a robotic body called a Synth, you complete missions from a distance, fight enemies, collect items, and upgrade your gear.
The Synth is highly customizable. You can switch out its body parts like the head, torso, and legs, as well as its weapons like guns and melee attacks. Instead of unlocking new abilities by gaining levels, you find them while you play. You can get skills like teleportation, healing, making shield zones, or even having a turret to help you. But just having these skills isn’t enough for combat. You also need to keep track of your health, shields, and stamina to get through tougher missions.
Familiar Mechanics with a Few Bright Spots
The game mechanics are simple and not overwhelming, but not every part of combat is enjoyable. The melee fighting is disappointing, it’s not very powerful, and the attacks feel awkward. Instead of being useful, melee attacks mostly serve as a way to break containers. This is a missed chance to make the game more strategic. No matter how strong my melee weapon was, the only good part was executing enemies, which had cool animations that made you invulnerable for a short time and sometimes healed you, depending on their special perks.
The shooting mechanics are also easy to understand. You can choose from a variety of guns and carry two of them during a mission. There are many options, including small pistols, submachine guns, sniper rifles, and rocket launchers. It’s important to note that not every weapon is good for every mission; sometimes you need a stronger gun to break through enemy shields, while other times you need something that can quickly take down many enemies at once. This part of the game is well designed.
The quick-time event reload mechanic introduces a strategic element that rewards precision and penalizes carelessness, but the overall combat loop becomes repetitive. Despite the variety of weapons and their unique reload timings adding some interest, the core gameplay remains static, lacking significant evolution in strategy. While the game sticks to a tried-and-true formula, it ultimately feels safe and uninspired.
RNG Reliance Hurts Progression
The quick-time event reload mechanic introduces a strategic element that rewards precision and penalizes carelessness, but the overall combat loop becomes repetitive. Despite the variety of weapons and their unique reload timings adding some interest, the core gameplay remains static, lacking significant evolution in strategy. While the game sticks to a tried-and-true formula, it ultimately feels safe and uninspired.
While missions provide a plethora of white and green items, the rare red equipment quickly becomes ineffective as upgrading older gear grows increasingly difficult at higher levels. Their superior stats often get overshadowed by the randomly generated white and green gear from the very next missions. Although white, green, and blue items can be enhanced with additional bonuses through card inserts, red items are fixed and unmodifiable.
CyberCorp uses two types of in-game currency to purchase items and customize equipment with cards. However, although you can accumulate a significant amount of currency, the in-game store often only offers white and green items that do not differ significantly in statistics from those obtained in missions. While there is enjoyment in testing different skills and upgrading them, the upgrade system feels incomplete. While collecting the other currency is relatively easy, the options for quality upgrades are scarce, limiting creativity and diversity in character building.
Ending thoughts
Exploration plays a crucial role in acquiring better weapons and armor, as the game rewards players for venturing off the main path to discover hidden loot and currency. Missions are diverse, ranging from run-and-gun action to stealth-oriented tasks, and everything functions smoothly. However, the story feels underdeveloped, as the text-only conversations between the Agent and Operator lack voice acting, which could have enhanced the narrative by adding personality and emotional depth to the interactions.
The game’s HD-2D art style matches its cyberpunk theme well, providing clear and interesting environments. The designs of characters and enemies are creative, adding to the game’s feel. The music fits the cyberpunk vibe nicely, balancing between exciting and calm moments that improve the experience. Unfortunately, the game has a story that’s easy to overlook and hard to care about.
Despite its flaws, if you enjoy looter shooters with a cyberpunk theme and don’t mind some grinding, CyberCorp is worth a shot. It may not change the genre, but it provides a fun experience and lays a good foundation for future games from Megame. The game also has multiplayer co-op, so you can team up with friends for missions. While the grind might not appeal to everyone, it’s great for short gaming sessions, and you’ll likely return to it occasionally. Overall, it’s a solid game, but it doesn’t take many risks, so don’t expect anything truly unique.
Review copy provided by the publisher
3.4
English (UK) 
Hrvatski