Cyber Attack

für zwischendurch ganz in ordnung.

Cyber Attack is a rather unusual action puzzle game coupled with a high level strategic view as you take on the role of a master hacker and compromise cities to steal influence, private user data and other resources which you then use on the development tree to increase your powers, invest in new viruses and so on. Gameplay revolves around choosing a city to attack, hacking it, then collecting the resources, doing some upgrades, and rolling on to the next mission. When you hack a city you can also pick up some other boosts but these come along with negatives, for example helping the Mayor with a compromised social media account might reduce some of your reputation in return for other benefits. Hacking itself is a minigame that has you simply tap on a spoke to "move" yourself around between various nodes while growing, menacing red circles grow larger. Each node has a bunch more resources that you gain when you take it over. You're also on a time limit, so tap fast, and avoid the big red circles. And I say big red circles because unfortunately the graphics are really minimalist. And that's a problem... a rather shallow minigame and minimalist graphics are where you'll spend a lot of your time playing this game and it's a very shallow experience... and you have to grind that if you want to get anywhere! One important note is that even though this is an amateur project, it does seem to be sincerely and genuinely made. I couldn't find any flipped assets, plagiarism or any other kind of insincere actions from the developer, but unfortunately genuine intentions alone are not enough to produce a brilliant PC gaming experience. On the upside, the game does feature customisable controls and resolution, so at least some of the basic, minimum requirements have been met. Unfortunately there's a number of other technical defects and shortcomings which contribute to the game being difficult to recommend to gamers. The game features extremely lazy, minimalist "art", of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The world map does look pretty cool, but at the same time, what you need to know is "that's it"... there's basically not much else in the game in terms of visuals. Hope you didn't spend too much money on a high end monitor and GPU! While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic low quality vector art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the mediocre 2D visuals. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this game was with players reveals a surprise... there's a modest spike in player counts for the game. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the game... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the game just has a couple of players every week running up the game and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many games like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards. So, should you buy this game? Cyber Attack has the comically over-optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. This is also competing with over 11,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product. Unfortunately Steam reviewers aren't presented with a "Maybe" option... if they did, that's what I'd choose. This isn't a completely bad game, but it's also not one of the best. As always, if you read my review and you can overlook the negatives I've called out, or they just aren't important to you, then by all means go ahead and buy this.