Cyberdyne Warrior
Platform: Commodore 64
Gametype: Undefined
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Players control a space marine who must search for droids on three planets - Geminus, Sirius, and Arius - while avoiding the planet's inhabitants and hazards. Energy is lost when players come into contact with an inhabitant. Up to three weapons can be used to destroy the inhabitants. Once all the droids have been collected, players make their way to the next planet where new inhabitants are introduced and the number of droids to be collected increases. Players have a limited amount of time to do this, but as well as energy and ammo, it can be replenished by purchasing more at the shop (only one shop per planet).

Came on '4th Dimension' pack from Hewson.

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Review

If I were to look back on my C64 gaming past, before the days when it was next to impossible to find a copy of Commodore Format (and when you eventually did find one it was only twenty-four pages long and had no real front or rear cover to it), I would say that the Rowlands created some of the most memorable games available for the Commodore 64 (why the titles were memorable is open to opinion), and I admit that there was a period in my life as a Commodore 64 games when I would eagerly look forward to the next release by the software house due to the amount of praise their titles received from the gaming press that was around at the time. With this in mind, and a call for people to contribute more reviews to this fine website you see before you, I quickly filtered the games section of Lemon64 to look for games that haven't been covered by previous reviewers. Now, looking at my filter results, I played every one of the games quite some time ago, and so I may be able to give an objective opinion having had experience of the game. And with Cyberdyne Warrior...well, I definitely have some experience with that game. 

On the surface it looks like a simplistic platform shooter - for the most part that's what it is - but Cyberdyne Warrior seems to have it's own unique sense of style, it's on unique challenges...there are things in the game that make it stand out from other platform shooters I have played, and it combines an interesting atmosphere with suitable pacing - pacing that balances all-out blasting with careful platform negotiation that demands the player be as delicate in his goal to get to the required destination as he (or she) is determined to get to the end of the stage in question. Getting to the end is not a task that is achieved by going through one single route though, because Cyberdyne Warrior is not simply a platformer whose levels use the lazy A-to-B formula that you see in less imaginative games of the genre: sure there is still an A to start from and a B to end at, but Cyberdyne Warrior's core gameplay objective is to collect droids that are hidden around the maps and then exit the level before the time runs out. This means that the droids can be picked up in any order that you wish, and so if you - for example - want to look for droids that could be beyond a switch that turns the gameworld pitch black, but do not have a lot of energy, you could look for a different droid in another area of the map and then use it to gain access to the shop, where you could buy some more energy and then be equipped to explore the area that you previously deemed to be overly hazardous. 

You'll need to remember about the shop as well, because there is a chance that you will be making frequent revisits to it when you are exploring a larger world and you have to replenish your time and energy reserves due to the fact that they have been depleted during large periods of exploration. Backtracking and forward-planning are key issues to consider in Cyberdyne Warrior; backtracking to previously dangerous areas because you have now regained energy by visiting the shop, forward-planning because if you pick up that droid right now, you'll regret it on the next screen when you inevitably plunge an area you know nothing about into complete darkeness, backtracking to kill the big enemy now that your gun has an enhanced calibre, forward planning because there might be an easier way to get from A to B than the one you are currently looking at, and wouldn't it be better to go into unknown territory without having dived into a life-sapping pool of nasty stuff beforehand? The flickscreen nature of the game is also quite useful due to the way in which the gameworld is compartmentalised into single-screen areas, and so there's none of the risks that you get in titles such as Turrican II where enemies can scroll on out of nowhere and sap away your energy. That's not to say that the flick-screen format is necessarily better, though, because there is a chance that you can freefall down the gameworld only for the screen to flick to another "life-sapping pool of nasty stuff" which you can't jump out of. Or something like that, anyway. Both formats of presentation have their flaws and their bonuses, and there are very few occassions when Cyberdyne's flickscreen approach will put you off. 

One other thing I have yet to mention; the game is not afraid of consistency, and so if you are expecting the kind of variety you get in games such as Robocop II (jetpack levels and tile-swapping minigames) or Creatures II (island hopping, interludes), then you can forget it. Cyberdyne Warrior is too proud of the ruleset and gameworld that it has created to confuse the player with changes of pace. Whilst changes of pace may be apparent in the game, they are never forced and always optional. In short, the player can overcome challenges how he or she chooses, be it by blasting everything in sight on a particular screen, trying to take the route that a) is the safest and b) will keep the player from wasting his or her ammunition, trying to look for an alternative way to get to a droid (as the games are as large in height as well as length) or by simply ploughing through a screen and hoping to come out of the other side alive. And when there are enemies that eat up ammo clips extremely quickly, sometimes you have to choose whether you value your ammunition or your energy the most. 

The only main complaints I have with the game are the deadly pits that you can't escape from and the aforementioned occasional enemy that takes one ammo clip too many (oh, and there's one jump on the last stage that I found incredibly difficult - but I had to get to the screen in question because I had explored everywhere else on the map and simply could not find this one droid I had remaining.) This is but a minor gripe though, and one that newcomers to the game will quickly overcome through practice, as their knowledge of the gameworld increases with every failed attempt. The pros of Cyberdyne Warrior far outweigh the cons, however, and it's an extremely enjoyable title packed with as much relentless action and frenzied scrambles for safety as it is careful forward planning and the kind of resource management and solution creation detailed in the paragraph above. If you like platform shooters, then this is a polished, creative and challenging example of the kind of games the genre can produce.


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