Digital Warfare In Cyber Knights Flashpoint
Games heavily inspired by Neuromancer and Snow Crash are a few in-between. But when you have someone like Mike Pondsmith convincing a bunch of Polish developers to throw so much money into a new project, what is considered niche comes to the mainstream.
It is trying, like I've seen Cyberpunk based games come and goes, including XCOM 2. But what about the hardcore players? The board players? The one knows the source of the culture? That's where Cyber Knights Flashpoint comes in, a quintessentially broken tactical based RPG, that's a little hard to swallow at first, but choom, it's about the overarching experience, right?
- Everything's high risk, high reward
In a downtrodden world where social collapse led to people scrounging for things to survive, you guys are a bunch of small time mercs who gets into a lot of odd jobs, eventually moving to the big leagues. Already sounds like a typical time spent, it's not.
After going through the character creation, I have to pick my squad, total six of them with four deployed for missions. The intro starts off with a lengthy tutorial, one that took a lot of my time. I mean come on, I got contracts to do, people to blackmail, stuff to steal, maybe even a hit placed on someone. Plus the UX. This is where I realized its presentation leaves a lot to be wanting.
Bad impressions aside, I pulled through. This is where I started to see the game blooming into the hardcore stuff. Your characters rely on action points, some you can spend halfway and yield it to spend later in the turn. Time is of the essence. It relies heavily on early game stealth, as you have to figure out enemies routine, security, and entry/exit points.
Think of it as like playing Commandos, but your characters are cyber ninjas. XCOM inspired gameplay superimposed with heavy-handed mechanics involving prediction, hacking, and escaping after finishing business. If not planned well, a lot can go wrong.
Some of the characters have abilities that doesn't need action points being spent, meaning you can often times spam it if you want, other times, you have to cover much distance possible while clearing out enemies or getting to the mission objectives. Also, these guys are weak, shutting down a laser grip or camera for one turn only? Should have put all the points into anti-security.
Everything's high risk, high reward, even spending ammo to take enemy down meaning you have to find good cover to reload, which takes up a lot of APs. Which also spends turns to around. You have to be super frugal with everything at your disposal. Planning ahead is important.
Which is why for some reason I'm really drawn into the game, it knows its stuff. It's bleak, the A.I. is pretty hyperreactive, which can get scary, especially if you plan on sticking around for long. It's also not a good idea to stay, as higher the security tally goes up, the worse things get. Before finally coming to the state where security gets really involved, and becomes a near death sentence.
- Dreams of being cyber enhanced
I know I've complained about these things, but it feels as if it's game worth taking the gamble on, as things will progressively get better as I play. Long as my characters are alive, long as we've maintained good rep with our contacts and not piss too many off. That implant on my character also had a loan taken, which needed to be repaid real soon.
Some you can blackmail, like the girl who raised the alarm while a piece of equipment was being spliced into my character, and the doctor doing the procedure got arrested in the first mission. A lot of powerful figures can also be your friends, exchanging some favors, connections. Some of these help out pre-mission, others you have to spend money for.
And then there's the hacking mini-game, I remember Deus Ex HR and MD's one, this takes the cake for being super complex. A lot of involve taking down traps, firewalls, and unsecuring the CPU to implant a virus before using it to shut down security, access to locked areas, and hell, making it super easy to kill almost anyone in the area without tripping security so much.
Most of the missions will pay a lot, and somewhere along the way, you get to unlock assets in your base, upgrade your teammate's abilities, buy them new gears, and such. Others, you send one of your squadmates for errand work, passively being done.
Which is why I want to continue playing, it feels like a lot of work and grind, but definitely something that'll get better much later on. The characters abilities, and gears will get stronger too, missions will be done in a cinch as I tackle the awful learning curve.
I also know that the developers are continuously updating the game. Fixing issues, adding QOL, and some features. I wish they'd added quicksave though, for some reason, that was a big afterthought for them. The story, world-building is rich, especially if you're super into cyberpunk culture. Yet, at times a little too familiar, hey, if it works; then I got no complaints.
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Above screenshots and GIFs are from personal recordings only
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