Cyberoque

I went in with low expectations and Cyberoque still managed to surprise me with how bare it feels. This is a 2D side-scrolling shooter set in a sci-fi 2215 scenario where humanity fights an invading robot army, built by a solo-ish indie shop called Dnovel. The premise is fine. The execution is the problem. On the mechanical side, Cyberoque is a side-scroller with shooting, some platforming, and a handful of alien-robot enemy types. The level design is flat enough that some reviewers noted you can park yourself in one spot and hold the fire button through entire sections. That's not a movement-shooter. That's not really a shooter at all. There's no time-to-kill tension, no weapon switching that matters, no positioning game worth talking about. The pacing is slow for a genre that lives and dies by snap reactions, and the UI elements on-screen reportedly carry placeholder values that never change. That's a polish problem you'd notice in the first two minutes. The multiplayer hooks are real on paper: the game lists PvP, local split-screen PvP, co-op, and online co-op as supported modes. In practice, finding another human being in any of those modes is close to impossible given the player population this title has accumulated over the years. Online co-op with zero active lobbies is just a single-player game with extra menu options. Local split-screen is the only mode where the multiplayer label actually means something, and only if you have a friend in the same room willing to run through sci-fi corridors together at low framerate. The audio is monotonous and the texture work was criticized even during its Early Access phase. Dnovel did push updates while in Early Access, adding enemy types and weapons, which is worth acknowledging. The effort was there. The result, though, is a game sitting at a mixed score on Steam, with only a small handful of reviews, no critic coverage, and no active community to speak of. It exited Early Access without resolving the core pacing and feedback issues that defined it. If you're the kind of player who mines ultra-cheap bundle keys and wants something to click through for twenty minutes, Cyberoque is technically that. For anyone else, especially anyone who cares about netcode, weapon feel, or a shooter that asks something of you mechanically, there are a hundred better options at the same price tier. Fred, Scout Team