MrBlueSky, Author at Gametrodon

Universe 3 – A Book Review

Universe 3 has a very good story. Unfortunately, this is an anthology, so there are six others that are also present.

One of the nice things about owning this blog is that I can write about whatever I want. Obviously, the intention is to usually cover games and things related to them, but there is no rule saying I have to stick to that. Today we’re going to be reviewing Universe 3.

Why? Well, because when I went out kayaking this weekend, I found it in one of those miniature libraries near the dock, and pulled it out.

Universe 3’s tag line is “Seven Great Original Science Fiction Stories.” I would personally rewrite it to “One Great Original Science Fiction Story, and 6 Stories That Are Technically Science Fiction And Also In This Book.” This should give you a good sense of my feelings on the whole of this collection.

The Death of Doctor Island

The Death of Doctor Island by Gene Wolfe is the first story in the collection. It’s also the one I hate the most.

This is interesting because it’s rare that I actually “hate” any piece of art. I may dislike a game, get salty, be frustrated, or be disgusted by the content of something, but actual hate is rare.

In many ways, the Death of Doctor Island is perhaps a perfect example of the issues with science fiction. You can set your story in the far future, a distant planet, or mighty spaceship. But if your characters are the same sort of person as exists today, you might as well just set your story in a small town in Ohio, because it doesn’t matter.

In this vein, The Death of Doctor Island takes place in what is, for all intents and purposes, an insane asylum. It concerns three patients, and a super intelligent AI of some sort. By the end, one patient has killed two of the others. In one case, literally, in the other case, metaphorically. This is done somewhat at the behest/lead of the AI running the place. Frankly, it doesn’t matter, because understanding the sci-fi in this story isn’t necessary to explain my problem with it.

I used to read a lot more. One thing I read years ago that stuck with me was a book about how to write mystery/detective novels. It contained a warning. “Don’t write what you don’t know” it said. “Readers will smell a rat, and it will tear down the rest of your story.”

About half a decade ago, I took myself to an emergency room at a hospital because at the time I wanted to die. My intention was to get myself hospitalized, so that I couldn’t hurt myself. The doctor convinced me to attend a day program for the next several weeks instead of the full hospitalization I was expecting.

Those weeks were by no means easy or pleasant, but at no point during that time did I ever feel like the social workers and doctors I talked to were doing anything other than their best to help me and my fellow patients. The idea of someone creating an AI doctor to “help” patients, that actively allows them to harm and murder each other as part of the “treatment” is laughable.

As such, Wolfe’s portrayal of “Doctor Island” is so alien to my experience of mental health that it is a great big fat rat, sitting atop the other problems in the story. The story that is resolved when a male patient murders a suicidal female patient, thus teaching him that he doesn’t have to be scared of women, while the super intelligent AI goes “Yeah, seems good, she wanted to die anyway. Cool, now you’re cured and can leave.”

Also, apparently this shit won a Nebula award? Go fuck yourself Gene Wolfe, please stick to improving the Pringles machine.

The Ghost Writer

The Ghost Writer by Geo. Alec Effinger is fairly… meh. Frankly, I don’t have many complaints. It is somewhat up its own ass, but in terms of interesting sci-fi ideas, it’s passable. Would I recommend reading it? Not really, but at least it’s not sexist. And doesn’t have weird racist undertones. You know, in retrospect, compared to a lot of the rest of these, it’s pretty good!

Many Mansions

Many Mansions by Robert Silverburg is a time travel story. It’s one of those artsy short stories where everything is done in disconnected paragraphs, and you have to try to sort things back together.

Ultimately though, this is a short story about a wife and husband from the far off year of… 2006. They’re unhappy in their marriage, and the wife decides to go back in time and kill/fuck her husband’s father so that they never end up together. Or something. The story is a bit difficult to follow, but I don’t really care. Most of this story seems to be an excuse to talk about an 83 year old groping his son’s wife, and fantasizing about fucking her.

You know what I really appreciate about porn or fetish art? At least it never tries to pretend it’s something else. Some sci-fi could learn from that. You never see an artist drawing massive perfect feet right in the frame, and then pretend “Oh no, it’s critical to the character, see it’s a statement about walking.” Okay, Tarantino does that, but no one else.

You can skip this one unless you have a generational fucking kink. In which case, hey I’m not judging. I’m just judging Terry Carr for putting it into a book of what I thought was supposed to be science fiction.

Randy-Tandy Man

The Randy-Tandy Man by Ross Rocklynne in unique from every other story in this collection in that I actually like it. It is, in some ways, the least sci-fi of the stories in the book.

Yet if the role of science fiction is to uplift, to remind us what tomorrow can bring, to show the bright spots of the human spirit, and perhaps most importantly, remind us that there WILL be a future, it is the most sci-fi of any of the stories in this collection.

I re-read it while writing this paragraph, and it still brought a smile to my face. These 11 pages made the 180-page book worth it.

The World is a Sphere

On one hand, The World is a Sphere by Edgar Pangborn doesn’t quite piss me off as much as The Death of Doctor Island. On the other hand, one of the core ideas in play with this story is slavery based on what I think amounts to race.

Look. I’m a white, straight-ish Christian-raised dude who grew up in a very rich area. You want my opinions on slavery? Here they are: “It’s awful, and you should probably find someone else smarter than I am for more info.” You want my opinions on race? “I am the embodiment of every in-power social group that has controlled society for the last several thousand years. No amount of exposure, or reading memoirs, is ever going to have me truly understand what it means to be ‘not a white dude.’ I understand shit is unfair, but I am the worst equipped person to try to evaluate or explain that unfairness.”

To give credit where it’s due, the story briefly touches on one interesting idea: old “Cursed” (read: ancient tech which is now heretical) sorcerous objects are purified and then allowed for use. The rest of it is weird/creepy redone version of post-apocalyptic not-Rome.

Also, a women gets abused in it, again, for no reason.

The Legend of Cougar Lou Landis

The Legend of Cougar Lou Landis by Edward Bryant feels like it has the same problem as Many Mansion and Doctor Island. It’s a story that is told in the future, but might as well be set in present. Or maybe the problem is sexism. I’m not sure. Since I’m lazy, here’s a synopsis.

A young women gets a birthday present: “A smoking hot bod, and an apartment in the trendy part of town.” She goes on to live what I think would be described as a bohemian lifestyle. Then her parents are like “You should come home and be a good girl.” She doesn’t want to, so they get one of her husbands to sell her out, and capture her so they can subject her to 1000 years of awful memories, which they have collected for some reason.

Is there more to it? Yes. Do I care? No.

I want to re-iterate my earlier point: if you just want to write [Mindbreak][Reversal] doujins, you should just do that instead.

Free City Blues

Free City Blues by Gordon Eklund was the last story in the book. It’s about a psychic girl wandering around some future city, and making people she doesn’t like quack like ducks, or slither around like snakes.

Also there’s a bit where she sort of works as a prostitute, but not really, because she just hypnotizes people instead. Also a bit where the author feels it’s important to tell us that when she was 14, she had sex with the 33 year old dude who had raised her most of her life. And then he apologized and didn’t do it again, so it was fine, and also she could have stopped him if she wanted, so again it’s fine.

Y’know, it feels like there’s some sort of theme in these stories, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

In Conclusion

Perhaps I am being too harsh on Universe 3. It was published in 1973, just shy of 50 years ago, and over 20 years before I would even be born. Honestly, it’s a little weird to think that this heavily worn hardback I picked up on a whim is older than I am.

What has it seen in its 50 years of life? How many others have read its pages? Did it sit forgotten on a shelf, only to be donated to mini-library I plucked it from, or has it passed from hand to hand only to end in mine? Now there’s a story I’m curious about.

On the other hand, perhaps I am not too harsh. Most of these men are dead (none of these stories were written by women). Two remain, but they are in their late 80’s. These stories are almost all 50 years old. Only one remains any good. Of the remaining six, one is decent, one I hate, and the remaining 4 feel like they should have been published in a different collection.

You know, the sort of collection you read with a hand in your pants.

Because they’re porn.

Cult of the Lamb

Cult of the Lamb isn’t a bad game, but it doesn’t commit to any of its single mechanics adequately to be an excellent game. The only area where it makes any real innovation is in combining the various gameplay loops that it consists of. But perhaps as a result of that synthesis, none of those loops felt very deep. As such, I didn’t personally enjoy it, and I don’t recommend it.

Let’s back up for a moment, so I can catch my breath from outrunning the screaming mobs. The game is getting a lot of good press and attention right now, and I suspect my opinion is going to be somewhat unpopular. Still, before you crucify me, let me explain myself.

Cult of the Lamb presents itself as a combination of a management sim and action roguelike. You play as the Lamb, resurrected from a sacrificial death by an elder god-like figure, The One Who Waits. Upon being returned to life, you are entrusted with two goals. To build a cult in his name, and to slay the four bishops who trapped him.

I’ll cover the slaying first. The action roguelike portion of the game follows the somewhat standard roguelite formula. Upon beginning a run (or crusade, as the game likes to call them), you’re dropped into a level and given a starting weapon and a curse. There are four or so base weapon types, each with varying speed and attacks.

The dagger is the fastest, but with low damage, while the hammer is the slowest, actually having a sort of windup before it swings. The sword and the axe sit in the middle. There are more variants applied to each of the base weapon types, but they don’t really change how the weapons play, just how much damage they do. Curses are just spells. You spend fervor to use them and they have some sort of damaging effect. You get fervor by killing and hitting enemies.

The system is pretty light on builds, so runs don’t feel that different. You can’t force weapon spawns to show up, and despite the variants, each variant feels the same as the base. For example, the poison dagger and the godly dagger don’t feel different to use, even if the second has much more damage.

Anyway, back to crusade mechanics. The goal of a run is to reach the end of the zone, which looks something like the map below. Along the way you’ll gather various resources and crafting ingredients.

While this might look a little intimidating at first, there are usually only 2-3 combat areas in a run. The rest are actually resource nodes, shops, or other small events.

Upon reaching the final area of a zone, one of two things will happen. One, you’ll face off against a mini-boss for a bit more loot and a recruitable. Or two, if you’ve already defeated the zone 3 times, you’ll face off against the zone’s boss: one of the four Bishops of the Old Faith.

I played the game on medium difficultly, and I’d say that none of the fights are particularly challenging. Only one boss fight in the game took me multiple attempts.

If you win the fight, you’ll get some bonus resources, and if you lose, you’ll lose some of what you’ve collected. Either way you’ll be sent back to your cult after. This is the management sim portion of the game. You can construct buildings with resources you’ve gathered. But you make the the most important building during the game’s intro: the shrine. The shrine is used to gather devotion.

Devotion serves the role that something like “Science points” would in another game. It’s used to unlock additional buildings and structures from your primary tech tree. The other resources you have to keep an eye on are the food and faith meters. While individual cultists have their own stats, these meters provide a sort of aggregate overview of the status of your cult. Keep your cultists fed, or they’ll start to starve, and get unhappy. Keep them loyal, or they’ll… I actually don’t know what happens to be honest. I never had any loyalty problems.

This might have been because the only time someone wasn’t loyal, I sacrificed them to be ritually devoured by tentacles.

Speaking of, rituals! Another building you unlock early on is the Church, where you can perform rituals and announce doctrines for your followers to obey. In theory, it’s kind of a neat idea. In practice, I never once ran out of the resource needed to perform rituals, so I pretty much just performed them whenever they were off cooldown. For some rituals the cooldown was several in-game days long.

The timing system itself is probably worth noting. Time passes the same regardless of if you’re at your cult, or on a crusade. And cultists can’t make their own food. So it’s somewhat necessary to either set things up so that they won’t starve while you’re away, or to try to minimize the time spent on your crusades.

This is as good a moment as any to talk about the cultists themselves.

While each individual cultist does have some of their own traits, they don’t offer much variety. I only ever saw cultists with a maximum of three traits, and most of them have fairly minimal gameplay impacts; things like “15% faster/slower gathering speed.”

The end result is that I never really felt incentivized to get attached to anyone, or to assign any specific cultist a specific task. The benefits to doing so were pretty much non-existent.

It doesn’t help that there are a bunch of other mechanics that discourage you from getting attached. Cultists can die of old age, which encourages constantly acquiring new members. But cultist death makes it feel bad to use gifts or invest any significant effort into leveling up a single member. There’s also a portion of the game where several of your cultists will be randomly selected to turn against you, and you’re forced to kill them. You can also unlock the ability to sacrifice members for various reasons, including to resurrect yourself after dying in the roguelike portion of the game, but I never used that feature.

This is the biggest argument for me on why Cult of the Lamb isn’t like Animal Crossing. Cultists aren’t friends or helpful NPC’s. They’re a resource to be used in your quest to slay the bishops. At their best, they’re pretty much slaves to your every whim. At their worst, you can sacrifice them to a pit of tentacles for emergency meat.

Since I’ve covered most of the game’s mechanics, let me try to wrap it all up into one neat package. The action roguelite section of the game doesn’t have the build diversity of other games like Binding of Issac or Atomicrops, or the mechanical challenge. At the same time, the cult management portion of the game doesn’t offer the mechanical depth of other sim games, like Cultivation Simulator or Dwarf Fortress.

At the same time it doesn’t have the comfy factor of something like Animal Crossing, since many of the mechanics apply pressure to your cult. It feels like a waste to construct various decorations and buildings when the same resource could be used to create another outhouse.

I’ve talked a lot shit, so before I wrap this up, I want to say some nice things. Cult of the Lamb has absolutely incredible art style, that it executes to near perfection. And while the plot twist is pretty easy to see coming, there were a few moments in the game that did creep me out. It’s not enough to change my opinion on the game. In 12 hours of gameplay, I can’t tell you the name of a single cultist or about a really cool run, but I do remember a small set of dialogue from an NPC that twisted the knife on how fucked up the game’s universe is.

So, yeah. I don’t personally recommend Cult of the Lamb. This isn’t because it’s a bad game. But what I personally tend to prize in games is either new weird mechanics/risks, or really fun moment to moment gameplay and systems. Cult of the Lamb doesn’t do either of those things. Instead, it’s a synthesis of existing mechanics, and watered down versions of their systems.

Cult of the Lamb is $25 for all platforms.

MultiVersus

MultiVersus is fantastic. If you haven’t heard of it yet because you exclusively read Gametrodon and literally nothing else, thank you for your loyalty! You’ll be given a ranking position in the new regime. If you have already heard of MultiVersus (because you don’t live under a rock), and haven’t played it, or were on the fence about playing it, stick around and maybe I can convince you to try it.

MultiVersus is a platform fighter developed by Player First Games, and published by Warner Brothers. If you’re wondering why I’m mentioning the publisher, don’t worry. It’s relevant. But first let’s quickly talk about platform fighters as a genre. Platform fighters are, for better or worse, defined by Super Smash Brothers. If you’ve never played a platform fighter, there are few things that differentiate them from traditional fighting games.

Platform fighters, like traditional fighting games are 2D games where you use your character’s moves to hit your opponent. As someone who plays both traditionally fighters and platform fighters casually, there are two big differences. The first is that platform fighters are far more open, with mobility much closer to a platforming game. The second is the win condition. In most platform fighters, instead of each character having a set amount of HP, they have a percent value. When you get hit, your percent goes up. The higher your percent, the more knockback you take when you get hit by an attack. But no matter your percent, you don’t actually die until your opponent can knock you off the stage. Finally, platform fighters often have more characters on stage than just the traditional 1v1, and MultiVersus leans into this. The game’s primary game mode is actually 2v2, with many of the characters having abilities that buff or somehow interact with their allies.

Speaking of which. Characters!

The other thing a platform fighter needs to be good is good characters. That’s easy for Smash Bros, which might as well just be the Nintendo “Who’s Who” list for video games even if the list does have some washed up entries. (Seriously, I’m pretty sure Falco and Fox are more relevant as Smash Bros fighters than their series is. And there hasn’t been a new F-Zero game in a million years.)

This is great if you’re Nintendo, but if you have to invent your own characters, like Brawlhalla, or Rivals of Aether, or anyone else in the genre it can be rough. After all, it’s not like you can just go dig up a treasure chest of intellectual property from the 40 years.

Hey, remember how I mentioned this was being published by Warner Brothers, and said the publisher would be relevant later?

Turns out, Warner Brothers has the rights to a lot of stuff.

A lot of stuff.

MultiVersus currently has a seventeen-character roster, which isn’t huge, but let’s look at a few folks in that roster. You have Batman and Superman. You have Shaggy and Velma. You have Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, and Wonder Woman. You have Arya Stark, and Lebron James. You have Stephen and Garnet from Stephen Universe, and you have Jake the Dog and Finn the Human from Adventure Time.

If you can read that entire list without going “Wait what” or getting a least a little excited for a moment about the idea of Shaggy absolutely thrashing Batman in hand to hand combat, then please come to my apartment so I can give you your “Least Exposed to Pop Culture” gold medal. I grew up without TV, I still barely watch TV, and I know who these folks are.

Unlike Smash Brothers, though, these characters aren’t from a video game, so it raises the question “How well were they adapted?” Personally, I think they’ve done a pretty good job. Shaggy is this kinetic bruiser, dashing around the stage, doing that funky little leg zoom walk, and tossing sandwiches. Finn is an assassin, charging up these big swipes of his sword and leaping around. From the characters I’ve played, they’re all fun, with their own tricks and traps.

But this does bring up a point I want to cover: I haven’t played everyone, because MultiVersus is F2P, and that means you don’t actually get all the characters. It’s the League of Legends model, where there’s a free rotation of characters, but if you want to unlock a character permanently, you have to buy them with either in game gold, or the premium currency.

This isn’t a particularly evil implementation of F2P, but it does commit a lot of the traditional sins of the model. I don’t want to put too much energy into calling them out here, so instead I’ll give you a quick list of why I don’t like it much:

Premium Currency can only be purchased in specific increments. This means you can only purchase say 1000/2000/3000 of it, but all the characters and skins cost different amounts. So you’ll always have some left over, and if you want to buy more stuff, you’ll have to buy more currency. It’s like the evil video game version of the XKCD nacho cycle.
Skins are expensive, like 15-20 bucks a pop.
There’s a battle pass/daily quest system, so you have that whole FOMO structure, and since a lot of your gold generation is linked to leveling up characters, it’s easy to tell the flow of gold will shut off pretty quickly.
Perks are a gold sink for F2P players.

Oh, that’s right! We haven’t talked about Perks yet. Lets cover them quickly.

Each character in Multiversus has four perk slots, 1 unique one, and 3 generic ones. The unique ones are a non-issue for me. You unlock all unique perks for a character just by playing them. They tend to offer some sort of boost, or change to one of your character’s attacks, but since you can see your opponent’s perk choices before a game, they’re not a big deal.

The generic perks are where I have a problem, not because of what they do, but because of how you acquire them. They tend to offer small buffs to both you and your teammate. As an example, one gives you an additional third jump in the air after you connect a hit. If you and your teammate stack the same buff, you get a better version it. For example, the aforementioned jump perk when stacked just lets you and your teammate have a third jump always available.

But anyway, this isn’t the problem with perks. The problem is that there’s a limited pool of perks you unlock for each character. Then you have to spend gold to unlock the rest, and you have to unlock them on a character by character basis. It’s like a worse version of League of Legends’ old rune system.

The gameplay itself, though, is what carries MultiVersus. And while I might not be a big fighting game person, the friend I played most of my 30 hours with is. To paraphrase his thoughts, while the game is very focused around hitstun and combos, it doesn’t feel super toxic. There’s also a larger focus on mobility, and to quote him directly “The lack of the homogenization of the trinity (grab/shield/stun) and the presence of charged aerials is a significant shift from other platform fighters.”

Personally, I just think smacking folks around in the game feels fun, and even as someone who sucks at fighting, the matchmaking has yet to throw me into a game that I felt like I couldn’t possibly win.

Speaking of matchmaking, let’s talk about the other part of online play: netcode. MultiVersus has some issues, but overall the netcode is far better than, say, Smash Bros online. There are still situations where it feels like your inputs are dropped, but it’s fairly rare.

Overall, MultiVersus is an incredibly fun F2P platform fighter, with a strong (if small roster), and solid mechanics. While it doesn’t commit any special sins of being a F2P game, I feel like it would be better if you could just buy the whole game instead of being hit with the traditional spending traps. That said, I might not have tried it if it cost $40, and that would have been a shame, because I would have missed out on one of the very few games to even try to give Smash Bros a run for its money.

MultiVersus is free to play on PC, PS4/5, Xbox One, and Xbox S.

To preempt the question from the one person I know who will read this article: it’s not available for Switch, and it’s not clear if it will be. Just go grab it for PC. C’mon, it’ll be fun!

Fore Score

Fore Score is a multiplayer minigolf game where you and your fellow players build out the hole by placing extra obstacles and items onto it. If you’ve ever played Ultimate Chicken Horse, the concept will seem pretty familiar. You start with a simple and plain course. After each round you and your friends are given a selection of objects to choose from, and then you place them to make the course harder.

I like a lot about Fore Score in theory, but in practice I have quite a few problems with it. There’s no single thing it does wrong, but none of its mechanics feel super satisfying. I also have problems with the game’s other systems.

Good luck ever making this shot without being ground up by the buzz saw.

Let’s start with the simplest one: the minigolf. Fore Score uses a 2.5d view for most of the golf, and you can’t apply any direct level of lift to the ball when you hit it. However, many obstacles are 3D, or launch the ball into the air. This makes it a sort of awkward hybrid of the two perspectives. The camera is also permanently locked, which again, makes judging certain shots very hard.

Why is the camera permanently locked? Well, it might be because the game doesn’t offer actual networked multiplayer. Instead, everything is a form of couch co-op. The game does support Steam Remote Play, which I have mixed feelings on. On the one hand, it means only person has to own the game. On the other hand, if you aren’t the host, you better hope your connection to the host is stable, or you might miss the critical shot. Because of that limitation, it makes sense that the game wouldn’t want to let every player randomly rotate the camera for everyone whenever they want. If nothing else it would make obstacle placement a confusing mess.

The only good way to describe the obstacles is ‘mediocre.’ There are several obstacles that are just reskins of each other, and boring reskins at that. Of the remaining ones, there just aren’t that many. There are several that will kill your ball and force a respawn with hitboxes that probably aren’t wrong, but are difficult to judge because of the 2.5d view.

There are a variety of blocks similar to the domino block in that they just fill two squares, and don’t do too much else.

Fore Score isn’t unfun, it’s just not as good a golf game as Golf With Your Friends, or as much of a route-builder as Ultimate Chicken Horse. If a game is going to stick with my friend group, it needs to either offer something unique, or be better than other stuff we already play. And Fore Score doesn’t succeed at that.

With that said, there have been some quality of life patches, so perhaps it will get better. If you’re still interested, you can find it here on Steam, and an early alpha here on itch.io.

You shouldn’t play The Cycle: Frontier

This is less a review and more of a public service announcement. I was recommended The Cycle: Frontier several months back. Maybe not so much recommended as someone told me they were playing it. I asked them if it was good, and I got told “It’s like Escape From Tarkov,” which didn’t answer my question. In retrospect, that might have been a warning sign.

But it was free. How much did I have to lose?

The answer is “5+ hours of my life.”

Why do I hate this game? Well, a lot of reasons actually! Funnily enough, they’re not the same reasons most negative reviews on the Steam page offer. Those reviews have issues with the massive numbers of hackers, and the claim that the game’s secondary map is imbalanced. The hacker complaint actually somewhat surprised me, as Cycle Frontier has very invasive anti-cheat.

Anyway, I have my own reasons for hating this game. In order to explain them, I need to explain Cycle Frontier’s gameplay loop.

In Cycle Frontier, you are a “Prospector” who gets airdropped from outer space onto some planet. Your goal is to collect as much ~~garbage~~ loot as possible, get to an extraction point, call down a shuttle, board the shuttle, and survive until it takes off.

Of course, the other players are also trying to do the same thing. One of the big differentiators between this game and something like Hunt: Showdown is that all players aren’t spawned in at the same time. More players can drop in whenever. And as you might guess, it’s a lot less work to just kill other folks and take their stuff, than to try to find loot yourself.

Let’s start with my first problem with the game: the loot. Loot in Cycle Frontier is visually difficult to actually spot, so much so that every lootable item has a glowing sheen effect that plays on it. I’m assuming they did that so I’d be able to tell that this random alien shrubbery is loot, and this one is scenery. In addition, there’s no “Take All” option, so each time you open a crate, get clicking.

Loot is also incredibly uninspiring. It’s all random trash and garbage that gets used as part of inane upgrade trees to… give you more stuff with your daily login rewards. Oh, I’m sorry, they’re called “Crates” and they’re on a timer, but they’re pretty much just daily login rewards. And perhaps most importantly, you know what you won’t find as loot ever? ACTUAL WEAPONS.

And this is a problem, because you can’t get weapons except by buying them. So forget about just dropping in naked, scavenging what you can find, and making do, because you won’t find anything. Backpacks and weapons almost entirely seem to only drop from other players. In my time playing, I’ve never seen a single one that didn’t appear to come off a corpse.

Of course, this all starts to make sense when you realize you can “insure” your gear to get it, or its equivalent value back in credits. Just spend a bit of your Premium Currency! Because of course this game has premium currency. And while there is a way to earn some of it in game, again, it’s tied to the daily crate system.

Now all of this might be tolerable if the game’s gunplay mechanics were incredible, and genre defining, but they’re trash. On multiple levels. Let’s start with the game’s AI enemies.

There are enemies in games that are “Bullet Sponges.” I wouldn’t describe enemies in Cycle: Frontier like that. The enemies in Cycle are the fucking Bounty Wipes best value, soaks up more than the competition of damage absorption. This is to presumably make up for the fact they’re braindead, with all the tactical sense of a rock. I’ve had more exciting tactical engagements trying to get a cat into its carrier so I can take it to the vet.

But again, this is more “large annoyance” than fundamental problem. Bad loot, obnoxious progression, perverse incentives for combat engagement, and bullet sponge enemies are all individually frustrating, but on their own, are not the death toll for a PVP shooter.

However, bad sound design is. And Cycle Frontier has the worst sound design I’ve encountered. I’m not a big audio person, so I can’t give a good technical explanation of why it sucks, but I can give a few notable examples.

Whenever a player is dropped into your map, they’re sent down in a drop pod, and it makes a large sonic boom sort of noise. This would useful, except that it’s pretty much omni-directional, and gives no info about where it came from. In one game, I heard something like 13 of these in a row, and I have no idea if it was 13 players or a sound bug.

In another game, I was crouching around when another player used the audio wheel to talk to me. Based on the sound playing, I assumed the player was located above me, and hid in a bush. However, after waiting a decent while, I saw them emerge, look around, and then scuttle off. Where had they been located? Maybe 30 meters behind me in the same small strip of river.

Another really obnoxious one is how the movement audio plays. If you move, the audio plays the full stepping clip, except that the clip is LONGER than taking a single step forward. So if you move and stop, there will still be sound. This all gives the impression that there’s someone around you, even when you’re completely alone.

The sound design is the nail in the coffin of Cycle: Frontier. It takes something mediocre, and transforms it into something effectively unplayable. There are other annoyances and frustrations, but it could be argued they are part of the game’s design. But a game where you can’t hear your enemy coming has no business being a hardcore PVP FPS.

Editors Note: The Cycle Frontier is actually being shut down shortly as of June 2023. I’m honestly a bit shocked by this. The player numbers don’t seem to be that bad.