Cyber Cyber, turning fight

Cyber Knights Colon Flashpointdoes not lead with its best foot.

It needs a bit longer.

But I’m about ready to start recommending it.

A pink-haired-mohawked character holds her pistol aloft and faces the camera, while her teammates take cover behind her.

It doesn’t really represent how most missions work, or dispel many assumptions.

I sympathise to an extent, because CKF is rather unorthodox.

It’s not an XCOM.

Hiding from a guard in Cyber Knights.

It hasn’t the ballistic simulation focus ofSilent StormorJagged Allianceeither.

This middle ground extends to stealth too.

Cyber Knights is a heist game, but the paramilitary smash and grab kind.

Hacking and scanning in Cyber Knights.

Each of those bring more alerts.

But these are notInvisible Inc.’s artful dodgers.

You’ll learn to exploit alarms.

A player crouches down in front of the camera, while dead bodies lay in the background.

Step under a camera and splat the guard who comes to investigate.

Excellently, guards can only raise alarms if they’re alive at the turn’s end.

Which makes it frustrating that it’s not always clear exactly where some potential alarm came from.

A sideview of the Cyber Knights space station.

It’s engaging enough, but a little lacklustre in terms of drama or effect on the wider mission.

Kicking up a high alert like this isn’t as devastating as it seems, though.

Rather than a stealth/combat binary there’s room for degrees of both, sometimes simultaneously.

Classes determine not just which attributes can go up, but add different bonuses on top.

Those implants are disappointingly numerical at present, though future ones will apparently include grafted weapons.

No word yet on the skull gun.

Characters define how CKF plays off the job, too, as you gradually build up an empty headquarters.

There’s no strategic map here, no bulletin board or exclamation mark hats.

Instead, you have underworld contacts.

Your every job comes from a specific person offering money or favours, or calling one in.

Many have relationships with someone on your own team, too, who have their own loyalties and pasts.

So far though, this side is lacking.

In practice I saw little difference between factions or their opinions, and I couldn’t be proactive.

But there’s little sense of the world beyond your base, or even where your base is.

I should also admit that CKF is too sturdy to qualify as “janky”.

Even the (incomplete) fashions lean into an unmoving chunky Soldier Guy / neon spandex duality.

It may not be the revolution, but then cyberpunk never quite does get there, does it?