Stylish time capsule supreme. This one's a clumsy nostalgic day trip for me every time. This is an excellent example of a top-of-the-line (at the time) graphics interface melting between genres. An essential example of game designers of throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. The story line segments are dated by today's standards. On the other hand this game's finest moments in my experience are the cinematic-flying-shooting stages. The other action sequences were too difficult for most of us back in the day. Most of the puzzles are about arcade timing with an attempt at a brain teaser now and then. Remember that this is the first game I ever played that allowed the player to numerically choose between arcade and puzzle difficulty. I figured out quick that you couldn't have both puzzle and arcade difficulties set at the lowest levels. "...is too easy," the female-borg voice would declare.
What made this game stand out was the monumentally amazing graphics it had (back in the day) and the way it would move through a interesting story very smoothly. Most of my friends in adolescence could at least get passed the opening shooting stage.I have fond memories of playing the 3rd airplane-sylish-UFO mission (the one in the snow) so much that I memorized the sequence better than my friends that could afford this game and the system to play it on. It was "my" stage. When someone in our gaming group wanted to make it to the "Cyberia" complex stages, they called on me for the third shooting-snow-shooting-flight-mission.
It took us early adolescent boys forever to get through the first few stages in this game because we never knew that we didn't have to kiss the girl and get knocked out after the fist shooting gallery!! It was Tyler that figured it out that the player could avoid much of the hassle of the first few stages. He passed on his little secret to the rest of us and for years we were having to press the space bar key "like a million times" to get Zach to say "uuhhh...I don't think so..." and thereby avoid having to endure the pain of making some security guy jealous at the beginning and thus throwing the player into a clumsy and strange version of "Metal Gear: Solid," not to mention the ol' "Star Wars: Rebel Assualt," when this game was merely "Cyberia."
Every time I drag this time capsule from it's Steam stasis chamber I enjoy watching the intro and waiting for the ever-friendly-Borg-chick voice (think 7 of 9 before there was a 7 of 9) demands "Enter Identification." My friends and I used to try to troll this voice. The idea of a video game vocally responding to every keyboard stroke of the alphabet made us giddy as the adolescent school boys that we were. Making the pre-voyager female-borg voice on this game in the first menu screen repeat the phrase "Pee...Pee..." by pressing the p key twice at a key moment was the height of male pre-adolescent humor at the time. This kickass CD-ROM game was another gem discovered at the ol' Electronics Boutique in the ol' Bay Brook Mall sometime in the mid 90s.