Cyberia² «Resurrection»

Posted by Philip Jong.
First posted on 23 November 1997. Last updated on 07 August 2009.
Articles  »  Reviews
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With only lukewarm success for Cyberia, Xatrix Entertainment hopes to fair better with this sequel. Although the high quality graphics and animations are breathtaking to watch, the combination of uninspiring rail shooters and mindless puzzles makes Cyberia² «Resurrection» yet another example of why action and adventure gaming rarely mix well together. In fact, it may be a wonder whether…

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Previous Comments

Excellent

Super music from Mike Kapitan! Super game!

Romania By Pavel Korolchuk • On 30 November 2008 • From Energodar, Ukranian

Excellent

Cyberia 2 rocks!!! it's a breathtaking game, excellent graphics and music, with some very difficult puzzles, cool rail shooter levels and i loved the story, this review is totally unfair.

Chile By raycool • On 19 July 2008 • From Chile

Very Good

10 years ago i play cyberia2 for first time and i like so much , i ll recomend this game ever , its a game from the old school .

Mexico By MAGH • On 18 April 2007 • From Mexico

Excellent

Well, i found it actually quite cool back when i was a kid. :) The puzzles were the annoying part, but the railshooting engine rocked. It had literally tens of object paths prerendered for each frame, so that you could shoot out the enemy earlier or later and it would show, you could cause some random destruction, like window glasses! A pretty new thing back then.

And the two main characters arguing childishly... well, i found it funny back then - it took away some seriousness from the game, you find some stupid stuff of that kind in Duke Nukem 3D, Metal Gear Solid series, etc. And i tend to get totally bored by games which take themselves too seriously, back then, and 10 years from then just as well. Though one may say that it was perhaps done with a target audience in mind, which was some 13 year old kids like myself.

As i was hacking the data file format back then - yes, i was a talented kid, but it was extremely easy - the file length is static, just a few bytes, since there are no branches in the story, unlike the first game. So i found a very interesting thing. It stored following things:
- chosen difficulty levels
- game progress (the number of scenes, which you have successfully mastered)
- and finally, a time equivalent, storing the number of times you were killed as you try.

The last one is particularly interesting. Apparently, all of the enemies in the rail shooting parts have some sort of difficulty index, and you would only see enemies up to a certain limiting index. This limit was apparently computed not only from the difficulty level you have set up at the beginning, but also from the number of failed attempts, so the game would gradually get easier if you really have trouble getting through! I find this little detail totally GENIOUS. With zero failed attempts you would have as many as 50 enemies, if i remember the scenery correctly, in one of the last scenes AT THE SAME TIME, to shoot down within some few seconds, and only a few if you had to retry a lot.

It still beyond me how the managed to put so many video overlays in the video streams... Today, a rail shooter wouldn't be video-based and wouldn't quite quite have this magic, because it is technically yet another 3D game like any other, 3D accelerators can render vast amounts of geometry, and texture baking takes care of the rest, so realtime graphics can be made very video-quality-like, for a railshooter even simpler so, since all visibility information can be easily precomputed. But a title released back then is a totally different thing.

I believe this review is quite unfair to the rail shooters in general, since they are actually a lot of fun, even today. What made me think about Cyberia, was actually playing the railshooter part in Rayman Raving Rabbits for hours a few weeks ago. I personally don't understand why both aiming and moving at once should be THE thing for each and every player on earth. Freedom is overhyped in general, as is AI - i still believe a good direction and scripting is best to make game experience full of interesting moments, instead of randomness we're falling into. Just think about the movies - if you were to move the camera by yourself, you'd most definately be worse at chossing the most artistically descriptive view than a world-class cameraman.

Germany By eye/photoAllergics • On 26 January 2007 • From München, Germany

I got only one thing to say... cyberia is very cool game with awsome graphics and very good gameplay ...
that's all i got to say....

Romania By madman • On 16 June 2003 • From Romania