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.