Cyber Battle 69

I want to love every small, ambitious thing that washes up on Steam with a sci-fi premise and a two-person team behind it. Cyber Battle 69 made that genuinely hard. Launched in June 2020 by Cracked Games, it entered Early Access as a VR cooperative horde shooter set on a desolate moon circling a gas giant at the edge of the galaxy. That premise has real atmosphere in it. A lonely outpost, infected swarming through abandoned city blocks, players scavenging for resources and upgrading weapons to survive one more wave. On paper, there is something worth rooting for here. The core loop, as far as the evidence allows me to reconstruct it, is cooperative survival: you and friends fight off escalating waves of infected enemies, loot what you can from the environment, upgrade your arsenal, and chase a reputation score that climbs as long as you stay alive. The game also advertised a PvP layer alongside the co-op survival mode, and enemies were reportedly designed to be dispatched in multiple ways rather than a single shoot-and-move pattern. The VR implementation was built around motion controls, with at least some community feedback indicating Valve Index controller support was tested early on. For a micro-budget Early Access title, that is a reasonably structured pitch. Here is where honesty has to override optimism. Steam's own storefront now displays a notice that the last developer update was made over five years ago. The community forum contains exactly five threads, the most recent of which is from August 2020. There are no published reviews, no Metacritic score, and no visible player base. A game built around online co-op and PvP with zero active community is not a game you can meaningfully play today. The weapon upgrading, the reputation system, the infected horde waves: all of that only matters if there are sessions to join. Right now, there are not. The sadness here is not that it failed. Plenty of Early Access games fail quietly. The sadness is that whoever built this had a specific vision, a sci-fi setting with genuine spatial character, a genre framework that was already proven by titles like Arizona Sunshine and Pavlov, and they started asking the community for feedback on plot direction and map design in the first weeks after launch. That conversation never got loud enough to sustain the project. The forums went dark. The updates stopped. The game exists now as a kind of ghost: technically purchasable, technically installed, technically VR-ready, and practically unplayable in the way it was designed to be played. If you are a VR collector who archives early indie experiments, or someone who genuinely wants to poke around an abandoned co-op shooter alone in singleplayer mode just to see what was attempted, the price point is low enough that the curiosity cost is real but not painful. Everyone else should redirect that budget toward a VR co-op title with an active server population. The idea here deserved a longer life. The product, as it stands in 2025, cannot deliver on it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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