Super Cyborg Review – Sick, Brutal Fun

Super Cyborg wears its Contra inspiration on its sleeve.

inspiration on its sleeve. You can see that right from when the word ‘Super’ slides onto the title screen, and then when you start picking up the familiar weapons of shirtless soldiers as you fight your way through an alien threat. Even so, Artur Games has created something new and brutal in this game, adding in new flourishes, combat mechanics, and a sickening, unique enemy art design. Anyone familiar with Contra will be right at home here, but you’ll need to develop whole new skills and really pick up the pace of your gameplay if you want to survive the seven grueling stages and get to the end.

Super Cyborg seems deceptively easy at first. All of the game’s weapons are on autofire, and most of its basic enemies die in a single shot from the most basic gun. It encourages the player to keep running forward as the enemies blast to pieces in their path. It makes the player want to keep finding new things to shoot, so you’re constantly rushing forward. It’s a fun draw to the game, but it’s also how the game slowly closes the trap in around you. That constant desire to push forward will be what spawns more enemies for you to kill, after all, but it’s also what will eventually fill the screen with so many enemies that you won’t see that one glowing bullet that’s coming for your head. One shot and you’re down, and you only get four lives per play to get through each stage (unless you know some cheat codes). You have as many continues as you want, but with death always so close and so easy, they won’t be enough without loads of practice.

The bullets can seem almost unfair at first. Many of the game’s shots blend in with the busy environments, which make them hard to track. Instead, Super Cyborg color codes many of the game’s enemies in a different way when they are capable of shooting back. Most of the aliens will just charge at you, but the few who do have firearms have obviously different color schemes. So, if you see a new color of alien, start watching the screen for shots. It might seem like making the bullets more obvious may have been a better fix, but that may have come at the cost of making the backgrounds a lot more simple and dull. Knowing which enemies have firearms is more than enough to make dodging shots a snap (sorta), so it’s a fine fix that allowed the game to keep its nice backgrounds and gameplay.

It mainly works because the shots travel a bit faster than Contra veterans may be used to. It’s noticeably quicker, getting to the point where I died quite a bit because my timing was just a bit too slow. It’s easy to adapt to, and because the shots happen so quickly you can usually count on one coming your way with a predictable amount of time once a firearm enemy walks on screen. You get to know this timing quite well, even if you are still dying a lot. Other than those enemies, the usual turrets and other gun placements obviously fire at you as well, so getting that timing down is key. Also, that faster bullet speed makes the game that much more frantic when you’re dodging six charging aliens and several high-speed shots coming from all sides.

Can we talk about some of these gross aliens for a minute? Because a lot of these things are just sick. Where Contra used a lot of robotics and aliens straight out of Alien , Super Cyborg leans more towards Abadox with its organic, pulsing creatures. These things all quiver and jiggle as they move, having hanging organs and beating sores on their skin. Teeth and growths dangle from them, making them look like genetic experiments gone mad. They look disgusting as they shuffle toward you, as if their whole lives are just constant pain from the haphazard ways their bodies have grown. The bosses take this design to new extremes, too, especially the first boss with its hanging growths and its combination mouth/eye weak point. These things just look insane with rage and pain, all while some vile fluids bubble just underneath their skin.

As gross as they may appear, they admittedly look fantastic in motion. These monsters smoothly run through their twisted motions in a way you don’t often see with pixel art. It all flows quite naturally, again something that is really apparent with the boss monsters. It can be hard to make movement look natural due to how many frames of animation you’d have to put into pixel art to make it look smooth, but Artur Gameshas put in the time to make sure every gross creature looks really nice when it lumbers towards you.

You’ll have some familiar tools with you to deal with those things before they touch you. You start with a basic machine gun, but can grab floating upgrades to get a more powerful one, including a spread gun, fire blast, and laser gun. The latter two weapons work much better than the versions from Contra , as in I don’t actively avoid them when I see them. The spread gun is still the best for clearing out huge rooms and hitting bosses from a safe point, but you also have another tool: The charge shot. You always possess this weapon, and while it takes a few seconds to build up power, it works wonders against bosses. There are often points in each boss fight where there is only a single moment you should be trying to hit it, so charging this weapon lets players get in some solid hits once the weak points appear. This charge shot also works differently for each weapon, so there are all kinds of useful applications for it. If you can stay alive long enough to keep your new weapon, that is. You lose weapon pickups upon death, after all.

Truth be told, I was rarely alive long enough to use many of the weapons. Super Cyborg plays like someone thought Contra was too easy, a lot of the time. As I said, the shots move faster, but so do the enemies. The game has many areas that always have a steady stream of enemies coming in from the right or left – not so fast that they’re hard to deal with, but fast enough that they cause a lot of trouble when combined with turrets or other, tougher enemies. They’re also fast and aggressive, so if you jump to a higher platform, they won’t just turn back and ignore you. They follow after you, so anything you don’t deal with will get you, eventually. They will even come at you from off-screen, preventing players from scrolling them off screen and eliminating them (a common trick from the NES days). Running is not often an option, as you’ll tend to scroll a whole new threat onto the screen while trying to get away, putting yourself in worse trouble. Taking your time is beyond important in this game, no matter how much fun it is to rush ahead.

Bosses are even harder, often calling in hordes of enemies to back them up when you’re already dodging several shots and other dangers. That’s just a start, as each of the bosses has several stages to the fight before you put them down, requiring tons of shots from powerful weapons to put down. These stages are wildly different from each other, such as the spider boss which starts with a fire-breathing bug caught in its web. From there, it will fire basic shots, then start leaving poisonous globs on the floor, swinging these spiked balls around, before firing small enemies into the room that you can only hit while ducking. It’s very hard to settle into one groove and win against these things as they change up the battle constantly, resulting in some really grueling matches. Later bosses draw from bullet hell shooters with how many shots are on screen while you have other enemies to fight, resulting in some of the most incredible victories I’ve had in a while. More often, though, it’s crushing defeats.

All of this is punctuated by some really nice music that draws from NES, SNES, and Genesis-era sounds. It’s a nice, varied soundtrack that gives the gameplay more punch, keeping the player pumped up with driving beats. Gun shots and the alien death sounds will also have players thinking back on the old days of Contra , but the soundtrack by Darkman007is brand new. The game has a solid boss track, too, a must for action shooters.

If you’ve missed the brutal difficulty of run-and-gun shooters, or somehow felt that they weren’t pushing you hard enough, Super Cyborg will fill that void in your life. It’s fast and hard, but has been carefully balanced to feel fair. Each of my deaths was a result of me getting greedy about pulling off a shot or by being careless, even amidst all the mayhem that was going on. The memorization is a lot harder to pull off than in old NES games, but with the impressive enemy designs and interesting backgrounds, you have plenty to look at while getting the game’s mechanics down. The gunplay and music are all familiar enough that Contra veterans will be right at home, but they, along with everything else about the game, stand out as brand new and exciting. Super Cyborg is a fantastic action game, and one that most players won’t finish for some time.

Super Cyborg is available for $4.99 from both the Developer’s Siteand Desura.