#FINAL BOSS CYBER SHADOW UPGRADE#

#FINAL BOSS CYBER SHADOW UPGRADE#

Looking at the game structure, initially I was disappointed by the game being presented as a linear progression while having an upgrade system, still I made my peace with that when I saw how ridonk the air slash/dash combo was. And when the level design isn't falling prey to some of those NES pitfalls alluded to earlier, it's a great showcase of variety that makes use of the gradual increase in abilities. I thought the bosses were uniformly great, an incredibly strong lineup of varied battles that felt a lot more balanced than the rest of the game, I nary have a negative thing to say about them. The difficulty level bounces all over the place, going off the top of my head here but I think it was chapters 2 and 8 struck me is being more tricky than those surrounding them in a noticeable way.Įven with the shoulder button option, the dash input never felt quite right and led to a few fumbles, to me at least, character control is incredibly tight though as has a great feel to it, so it's hard to harp too much on this point. These special moves being both necessary tools for traversal while dipping into the special meter resource never felt quite right, like a section requiring downward thrusts to break through flooring and thus depletes your meter and limits your future attacking options (interestingly the air slash hitting an enemy seems to guarantee an SP drop though so there's that). The overlapping control scheme I imagine stems from mirroring the limited button options of an NES controller (shoulder button dash not withstanding) which can lead to a few awkward moments like accidentally air slashing across the screen to your doom.

I can kinda understand that, especially in a game where you can extend your health bar it ain't great to design an obstacle course segment and then someone just sneak past half of it with some cheap hits, still as the game ramps up the small platforms over death hazards while projectiles fling in all over the place, maybe those electrified floors should just hit HARD instead of insta-kill. Between this focus on instant death floors in later areas and a laughably small amount of invincibility frames I almost get the impression that they didn't want the player to ever be able to have a damage boosting moment.

One of the appeals of the modern retro inspired title is to take that old school style and exorcize the clumsier aspects of them, often those related to making things 'hard' back in the day so you wouldn't storm through the game at pace.Ĭyber Shadow is indeed one of those games where you have a health bar but you may well forget with how often your deaths comes from being knocked back into a pit/instant death spike/electric trap.

This is one of the most frustrating games I've played in a while I gotta say, not a bad game but one that feels like it has the potential to be a modern retro styled classic but keeps making small decisions that add up to drag things down.

Final boss cyber shadow