OPERATOR
please note that the showcased items above are running on a temporary lighting and scene building system and that the final game is subject to graphical enhancement
**IT WILL OUTLAST US.
IT WILL OUTLAST YOU.**
Welcome to Installation Jade. A megastructure and machine managed by an illusive and authoritarian Director. Nobody knows who built it. Nobody knows it’s age. Nobody’s around to ask.
You are an Operator. An artificial consciousness implanted within a preserved human body from long ago. Your tasks are simple. The Director’s orders firm. You are to be activated, assist in the standard operating procedure of the installation and do it with a smile. And so is the Operator after you, and after it, the system is to be kept alive until the end of time. But maybe it isn’t that simple. Maybe the Operator isn’t as mechanical as the system around it.
OPERATOR is a hard to define game about humanity’s struggle against an ancient inhuman odyssey of entirely human origin. About overcoming an inefficient machine entirely focused on self-preservation and either a liberation into the great unknown or a spiteful revolution of mutual destruction. Or maybe it’s just a game about manipulating a mysterious machine in a desperate attempt to end the Director’s mad cycle. Who knows?
In OPERATOR the player has agency over the installation and it’s warped reality, using the Installation’s Operating System to overcome the hostile machine’s many dangers and evade it’s pacification forces by manipulating the worldspace itself.
This is the first game developed by Australian indie solo-developer Cooper Braun and his studio Virtual Edition.
Read More: Best Strategy RPG Experimental Games.
Midnight Protocol
I don’t have many games in my library - I’m quite picky in my tastes. I’m not usually one for hacking games but the Demo left me wanting more. After 22 enjoyable hours, I’m evidently happy to have added this game in my library. I waited to give this revieuw untill I finished the story for the first time - It will certainly not be the last. I’ll take some time to revieuw a few aspects of the game that might interest you most:
Gameplay/Mechanics: 8/10
A game is nothing without gameplay, and a hacking game sets a promise: it will not be just ‘a game’ - but one with depth, complexity, and decision making. To achieve this, Midnight protocol structures its gameplay around levels that feel like a labyrinth or puzzle. A Digital dungeon, if you will. To get around the various obstacles such as firewalls, encrypted nodes and ‘antagonistic’ system operators that chase you down you get access to hardware you can tailor to your playstyle, as well as a host of programs each with their own up- and downsides. You quickly learn how to balance them carefully, using fairly easy commands to allocate memory to the programs you need in order to finish the level. Suffice to say, Midnight protocol nails the hacker-feel you’ll expect. It is not all roses and sunshine of course - there is quite a reliance on RNG to many of the mechanics of the game that can make you second guess your decisions while they are actually fine, or save you when you know you had no right to make it. Aside from that, i found myself at times trying a level, finding where the hidden obstacles were, and avoiding them alltogether once I got to reload the level. This was- at times-unavoidable, and felt wrong. I’ve since noticed that these hidden obstacles are slightly randomized, at least in some levels, which alleviated this somewhat. Perhaps the developers could not just list potential ICE, but also include a map at the beginning of the mission (once you enter a mission you see the layout anyway, except in rare instances), that does not show the obstacles, but layout of the nodes beforehand. With this information I feel I personally would not have had to reload to adapt my strategy as much as I did.
– Real player with 41.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Strategy RPG Singleplayer Games.
| 🔵 POI | ✔️ Pos | ❌ Neg | 💡 Ideas | 🍿 Video | ⭐ STAR |
FINAL REVIEW
🔵Ultimately MP is a puzzle game running under the guise of a hacker game.
🔵Each Network is a puzzle, and you must defeat the puzzle using commands & tools.
🔵MP could be considered a Lightweight Hacker game which introduces turn-based gameplay
🔵Has some additional unique and impressive gameplay mechanics.
🔵I was instantly Immersed by the story and the characters.
– Real player with 29.2 hrs in game
Cyber Knights: Flashpoint
Explore the dystopian cyberpunk future of 2231 as you command a company of shadow mercenaries working for the highest bidder. Cyber Knights wraps a world full of consequential story choices and significant character development around a rich core of classic and new mechanics. The game combines tactical elements like stealth, hacking and tense combat with strategic features like base building, contact management and in-depth squad customization. Cyber Knights invites you to jack in and explore a unique cyberpunk world and the immersive, human stories of your merc team in the dark future of 2231.
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Turn-based Tactics: Deep and tactical gameplay using a turn-based, gridless third-person combat simulator. Cover! Overwatch! Recoil!
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Dynamic Cyberpunk Story: Unique interwoven narrative with depth, meaningful player choices and hundreds of hours of gameplay. Create your own story reminiscent of pen and paper cyberpunk RPGs
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Sophisticated Missions: Combine stealth, hacking and combat across multi-stage missions. Gain pre-mission advantages from Contacts
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Endless Builds: Experiment with endless combos of Jobs, cyberware, weapons and gadgets to build the perfect team
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Evolving Characters: Your team evolves as the story, your choices and battle leave lasting wounds, add Traits and threaten to strip their humanity
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Safehouse Base Building: Construct a custom safehouse and upgrade rooms such as weapon shop, hund kennel and medical bay.
Cyber Knights strikes a unique tone with a futuristic setting that has passed through the messy near-future to arrive at dystopian 2231. Man-made environmental disasters have ravaged our biosphere. Artificial consciousness has been created, subsequently murdered, and then strictly outlawed at a global level. Megacorporate colonies and research stations dot the solar system from Venus to Jupiter. Quantum computing has radically altered the digital landscape and the very meaning of privacy and digital security.
The game’s threaded stories originate from both inside and outside your team – weaving together threads from your hired mercenaries, criminal connections and history that just won’t die. These stories operate on three interconnected and at times overlapping levels – personal stories (your team), contact stories (your employers) and event stories (city-wide).
And every choice you make and mission you run will impact your character’s permanent Traits, changing them in both subtle and big ways. Their stories and your choices combine to create a unique narrative for every game, every Knight and every team.
The second game our studio created, Cyber Knights RPG, took hundreds of thousands of gamers on an gritty cyberpunk roller-coaster, trying to get rich or go down shooting. The classic Cyber Knights has always had a huge following within our community and we are xcited to come back to the world and stories we started creating there so many years ago with an all new game, Cyber Knights: Flashpoint.
We’re weaving together the genre’s classic themes with the unique setting and history of Cyber Knights to create some of the most cutting, gripping and human stories we’ve ever told. Betrayal, sacrifice, trading away humanity for an advantage, living fast and dying young, revenge and testing the bonds of friendship and trust – it’s all here under the New Boston dome.
Read More: Best Strategy RPG Cyberpunk Games.
Case Simulator Weapons and Armors
:)
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
Cyber Ops
This game is great and I’m kinda sad it got so many bad reviews. It’s challenging but honestly it’s not nearly as hard as people make it out to be. Once you figure out the mechanics it’s challenging but perfectly feasible after a couple of tries. It had some bugs at launch but they have all been fixed already.
Great atmosphere, good voice acting, nice looking interface and very singular gameplay. Being the guardian angel hacker behind a screen while the operators actually do the work might not be for everyone but I personally love it.
– Real player with 25.1 hrs in game
Every negative review is sadly 100 % correct. Only 25 % ever made 1st mission. Only 0,3 % players ever finished the game and 1 % just hacked the “game finished " achievement, because more players finished game than finished last mission. You will be fighting the logic breaking UI problems more than “triangle” enemies. All moving enemies are called “turrets” when killed. You don’t know at this moment if cyborg or human enemy type died.
You will NOT be able to win after level 5 without good oldschool health cheats. The game is so buggy that some mechanics needed for victory don’t works sometimes. I won spider-tank level 6 fight legit first, but squad just glitched at the door when leving the cathedral. QTE skillchecks are also broken or start at unwinnable state.
– Real player with 23.1 hrs in game
Brigand: Oaxaca
Brigand Oaxaca is one of my favorite games of all time. Rough around the edges, buggy, brutal, and incredibly frustrating, it’s a treasure the likes of which you’ll rarely play. It’s creator, Brian Lancaster, is something of a tortured genius who, in between intense ayahuasca trips, and Mcaffee’esque stints in the jungles of Latin America, sought to share this powerful premonition of the plight of humanity in the upcoming apocalypse.
In all seriousness, this game scratches a niche that probably only a certain crowd will enjoy. If you like the original Deus Ex, but want it a little shittier, this is for you. If you like rollenspiele classics like gothic and og fallout, but feel that their unity of design and assets wasn’t tenuous and wild enough, this might be for you. If you like Stalker, but could do without all of those fan patches and bugfixes, then this is absolutely for you.
– Real player with 122.2 hrs in game
I think this is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I found it on the steam store page during the summer sale, and one glance at the preview video cemented it as something I had to buy, dlcs and all. I don’t regret getting it, in fact, I’m still in shock I hadn’t heard of this game sooner. Deus Ex-like gunplay? Open-ended gameplay, with (mostly) complete freedom of choice in how you want to complete the story? Voodoo (!) and cybernetics? A save system that lets you save scum but also gives you the thrill of permadeath by starving you of beds at times?
– Real player with 107.8 hrs in game
Conglomerate 451
Hey guys,
TLDR: If you like dungeon crawlers, especially futuristic (ala Starcrawlers) there is a good chance you will like this game too.
Conglomerate 451 is set in and under (water) a cyberpunk style city. Actually my favourite map is the ‘entry’ cityscape. I love the look and the rain/water effects are pretty nice. Would liked to have had missions based in an offshoot of the outdoor area but currently all missions are enclosed. After the tutorial mission you can skip this part and head straight to the mission, which i do not recommend as buffs and map hacks and shopping can be done in the city and can make the mission itself more rewarding and easier.
– Real player with 114.7 hrs in game
*** this Review has been updated after the developer addressed some of the issues. It’s good to see that they are listening to feedback and including suggestions in their process****
This game. . . First off, I haven’t played as much as it shows. I leave games on overnight etc. so. . . I’ve played a little over four hours. . . too long to get my money back and just long enough for this game’s deep flaws to become unbearable for me. I can’t recommend this game to picky gamers. Here’s how it broke down for me:
– Real player with 83.1 hrs in game
CodeWalkers
Remember the old days playing on your Digimon at school, well this game reminds me of that.. but on my PC playing over the net with friends. I have it on in the background as I’m working or playing other games. I’m really enjoying it and look forward to updates the Dev’s are working on.
– Real player with 13.6 hrs in game
Simple, yet requires a lot of strategy to set up character builds. Fun to play and break. Remember O' Developer, the Beta Champion will one day beat you.
Also, I would recommend buying 11/10.
– Real player with 10.7 hrs in game