Super Cyborg is a pixeled "homage" and by homage I mean clone of NES Contra games. The visuals are really good, with lots of variety and truly horrifying imagery. The monster design is garish and absurd, looking biological, alien and monstrous all at once and sometimes in ways you don't even recognize until you look at them longer. Then the music is really good, and the game feels good in motion. The menu screen looks great as the music fires up. You're pumped. This is going to be great!
What could go wrong? Everything. Everything could go wrong. A speed run of the game is about twenty minutes long, it has that little real content. Obviously learning the game should take a lot longer than that, but the game doesn't try to make you "learn" in a way where you "get better".Super Cyborg is built around two core axioms for difficulty: Pattern memorization and situational unfairness. The first one is what I meant by never getting better. You don't get better at Super Cyborg, you just learn the patterns and whereabouts of all of the things that kill you. Which is everything. This leads partially to the second axiom: The game puts you in spots where enemies can jump on you or otherwise attack you and you have to struggle to fight back. I mean incredibly stupid stuff like you're going up a slope, and your gun doesn't shoot up the slope, so you can't hit enemies casually walking down toward you. They just amble toward you, not a care in the world. Unless you have the spread gun ... Which we'll get to discussing in a moment. NES era design just feels like surrealism in this day and age. Instead of feeling like a bad ass, you're flailing around, until you memorize the spots you need to be, though sometimes there are no spots and you're just not supposed to be in X spot with Y gun so whoops u ded.
Oh, and most of the weapons are garbage, and you lose your weapon when you die, so if you die just start over and get the good gun again. Since without Spread, you can't hit most enemies. So you end up spending additional time hitting the re-start button, because the developer I guess never played his game and didn't realize the lives/continues nonsense doesn't matter. You have to have that gun, or the game is just insanely hard. The hardest points, by the way, the become moments where other power ups appear on screen and you have to desperately dodge getting the inferior weapon. Does this sound like good game design in action?
There's not really much to say about Super Cyborg. It's a very short, pointlessly hard game I got half way through. Needing to constantly restart and redo sections to learn patterns just made me feel like I was studying for an algebra test. There is a lot that could be done to bring the genre forward and refine it, but this game does nothing new with the gameplay. The game looks cool, but it is ultimately just 80s tier design.If you look at the screenshots and think that looks radical, and you're up for pattern memorization based trial and error gameplay, there you go! You're the tiny niche target audience! It's a well made game for what it is, but what it is, doesn't interest me in the least.
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