Cyberia

The Good
Cyberia has a great story and it's this that will drive you to finish it above anything else, the way in which this game and its sequel connect is very clever and well done. The use of pre rendered visuals is pretty interesting in the adventure sections giving several set points in the room you can go to and at each one you have to choose which point you want to go to from there. While this is limited, it does help to give a little freedom to the game. Some of the puzzles and exploration are pretty good and as far as pre rendered shooters go, the on-rails shooter sections are also fairly decent for what they are. The sound and voice acting is decent and the visuals, at the time of release (1994) were amazing. This is one of the first pre-rendered games to use motion capture and it works well.

The Bad
The very fact that the game is pre rendered is a crippling problem in terms of gameplay. In the flying sections you are forced to go where the rendering takes you, leaving you the control of only a target. The adventure sections are very irritating to navigate because it's often hard to tell which direction you're headed in until you get there. There is far too much sudden death in the adventure areas usually occurring because you poked your nose into a new place. The actual puzzle game sections are very difficult to work out, often you solve them through shear luck and not skill. In the rail shooter sections there are often cutscenes of an enemy vechile exploding which is fine, the problem is that if you failed to kill the one that explodes in a special cutscene, you explode. This is regardless of how much health you had and there is no telling which enemy might be part of an impending cutscene. Lastly, often the point of playing a game like this is simply, eye candy and while this game had some of the best around in 1994, these days (2001) it is understandably very dated and looks far worse than games which we can now play in real time so the incentive to play for visuals is lost rather which leaves us with little else.

The Bottom Line
Cyberia has very little in the way of actual gameplay which is expected with pre rendered slog-a-thons but while it was visually stunning for its time, these days the only reason to play it is for the great story or if you played it when it was released and are feeling a mite nostalgic.

The Good
The music is ok.

The Bad
Lets face it people, this game is terrible. It was bad on the playstation, and its worse on the computer because the controls suck that much more. Hey nice consept, a over glorified shooter, that features pure linear play, WOW doesnt that sound fun.

The Bottom Line
Dont waste your time, this is pure crap.

The Good
Golden rule is not to make many cinematics iin between missions of some shooter game, golden rule is to make a cinematic out of a shooter game. And thus, Cyberia was born. Using extremely beautiful graphic and pre-rendered animations all throughout the game I can undoubtedly say this game got me hooked like no other. It's not that I'm a sucker for beautiful graphic, but I am for good cinematics.

You are cast in a role of Zak, a computer hacker of some kind who was waiting to be executed, but got a tempting offer which he chose instead of his execution. At first it is har to tell what are you doing and why, and are hoping that more of the plot will be revealed to you as you move along. The game is generally comprised of three parts, the adventurous one when you're doing the regular exploring from a third person perspective, the mindboggling one where you use your special glasses that are more than meets the eye to hack into whatever opportunity brings. And the last and most amusing and amazing one is the sheer shoting which is done from first-person perspective.

For when I said the entire game is like one big cinematic, what I meant is there's everything prerendered, including your own moves (you just tell Zak where to go, but you don't go there, he does), but some other cinematics there sure are present. Tops ones to be while you're reaching Siberia in a prototype craft with autopilot and your only worry targeting cursor. Music in those 6 or 7 flying missions is so perfect for action scenes and short cinematics in between shooting I haven't encountered better assemble of music and cinematic ever since.

Sure, people may not like games with little influence to the course by the player, where everything is majorly done by the computer AI, but that's why it is called a cinematic, and no matter graphic on some nowadays games may exceed the look of these cinematics, I find this game to be one in a lifetime. I still am bedazzled why it didn't pass as well enough to conclude the trilogy but only to get a sequel.

The Bad
Solving certain puzzles may be a bit frustrating, especially since you can get killed pretty easily whenever failing to deactivate or bypass something. But these puzzles are what keep this game under balance and just to prolongue the inevitable.

The Bottom Line
This is one of a definite classics if you ask me. A game that brought something fully pre-rendered to our computers, and the developers that knew how to make the recipe for the right mixture of all the elements that make this game so good. Depending how much you like self-driving games like this, where you enjoy cinematics to the top, you may also try Cyberia 2 and Rebel Assault II.