Super Cyborg

Genre: Action-Platformer

Players: 1-2 Co-Op (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Awesome Platformers Bundle (5 in 1) along with Spirit Roots, Steampunk Tower II, Sweet Witches, and Swaps and Traps.)

Super Cyborg is an Action-Platformer released on PC in 2014 and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2022. Players control the titular cyborg blasting away hordes of alien invaders. Okay, I’m not going to bury the lead any longer here. This game is basically an off-brand version of the classic Konami game Contra. This is not a subtle homage, this is straight up recreating the experience of Contra with a different coat of paint.

As far as that coat of paint goes, Super Cyborg makes use of pixel art visuals that are somewhere between the 8-bit and 16-bit eras, with the visuals clearly inspired by the first one or two games in the Contra series, but with a more detail to them than we ever saw in those days. This works well enough as a “this is how you remember those games, not how they actually looked” sorta’ thing. These visuals are backed by a chiptune soundtrack that does a good job evoking the era of games this is imitating, albeit without being too memorable.

And that brings me to this game’s biggest problem. It is so very concerned with replicating the experience of a classic game that it fails to establish any identity of its own. The cyborg characters here are nondescript and free from personality, the levels look nice but don’t seem very inspired, and the enemies here are largely plant and bug-based, but don’t have anywhere near the imagination of the H.R. Giger-inspired grotesque monstrosities of the Contra series.

The same holds true for the gameplay. Now, to be clear, the gameplay here plays fine. In fact, it plays pretty much exactly like Contra did thirty-five years ago, and that game is still a classic. Here’s the thing, though… if I want to play Contra, I’ll just play Contra. For a game inspired by Contra, I would hope that it does something unique or interesting in its own right, and this game really doesn’t. There’s a button players can use to charge a shot instead of rapid-fire, and players can hold down the R button to stand in place while they aim, but these hardly seem innovative compared to the countless games in the genre that came out since Contra was first released, with many of Contra’s own sequels doing far more inspired things than anything found here.

With a price tag of $7, and solid Action-Platformer gameplay, Super Cyborg is still well worth a look for fans of the genre, but after my initial delight at how well this game replicates the experience of a beloved classic, I quickly found myself losing interest as it just doesn’t seem to do anything more than that.

tl;dr – Super Cyborg is an Action-Platformer that is clearly directly inspired by the classic game Contra, and it does an excellent job of replicating that game’s gameplay and visual style. Unfortunately, it fails to do anything especially original or noteworthy, making it a forgettable experience. If you enjoy Action-Platformers, you’ll probably enjoy this one, but it’s not going to provide you with anything you haven’t already seen countless times elsewhere.

Grade: C+

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