It's the year 3569. You are a businessman who wants to become a powerful mining magnate. To reach your goal, you'll have to fend off competition from seven other huge corporations. To make it to the top of the heap, you'll need to take control of a newly discovered jumpgate in the distant Typhoeus system.
CyberStorm 2 is a tactical strategy game that expects you to look at charts, expand your forces, create massive wealth, and plot your way to conquer the jumpgate for ultimate victory.
The main thrust of the game, and the aspect which absorbs the majority of gameplay time, is the expansion of your base through new construction and the upgrading of facilities. Base improvements increase the earning potential of your mining operation. This money enables you to build bigger and better buildings and vehicles, and even (thanks to genetic engineering) the 'perfect mine worker.'
The early missions are simple. You just wander around and blow up anything that gets in your way. Further into the game, things become far more complicated (and regrettably, much slower) as you have more units and facilities to watch over. In these stages, the emphasis of the game becomes the customization of your vehicles. You can combine 27 types of chassis with over 300 add-on devices and weapons.
If you can be bothered, that is. The game is quite fun for a while, but soon reveals itself to be superficial and lacking the depth of other, more engrossing strategy games. At times, the point of the whole exercise seems very dull and the game allows itself to become unnecessarily complicated.
If you need help during the game, the whole process slows down even more because the help files are kept on the game's CD-ROM in Adobe Acrobat format and are very inconvenient to access.
There are lots of graphically interesting explosions in this game, but nothing out of the ordinary for the genre. If you're new to strategy gaming, you'll probably find yourself losing interest in this game. If you're a serious strategy gamer, you've probably played many better games and already have more absorbing titles than this in your collection.
Graphics: Adequate for this level of strategy game.
Sound: Sound effects and music are not outstanding.
Enjoyment: Too similar to many other games.
Replay Value: Not worth playing again.
The sequel to CyberStorm brings with it the rare option of turn based or real time strategic combat and tries to deliver a fun and nice looking game. Due to the hard gameplay and not so great graphics, CyberStorm 2 fails in its attempt to try to simulate a good RTS game. Anyone who expects this to be Command & Conquer will be sorely disappointed, and even those who don't care what it might be will probably be disappointed.
Storyline:
CyberStorm 2 takes places in the StarSiege universe, years and years after the Cybrids have long been defeated. Eight corporations now vie for power throughout the universe, and when a new jumpgate is discovered, the corporations race to try to take control of it, because whoever has control of that jumpgate will have a huge amount of power within the universe. You are a Herc commander working for one of those corporations, and your job is to gain control of the star system and the jumpgate, all in the mean time keeping the other corporations at bay.
Features:
Not too many features abounded within this game, but it does allow for customization of units and manipulation of the pilots. The graphics aren't a good feature, and the sound is average, but if the graphics are ignored, the gameplay is not that bad. The menu system is really nice looking, and you have a number of options that include training, quickstart, single player, and multi-player. The training teaches you all that you need to know at a slow pace, which is both good and bad. The quickstart lets you specify what type of mission, where, what corporation, and levels of difficulty, or you can just leave it as a random mission. The single player option puts you into the campaign of taking control of the jumpgate, while the multi-player allows you to battle over the internet, network, or direct connection with other people.
Gameplay:
Real time strategy games are always interesting, but this was not at all. The game does allow for either turn based or real time game playing, and while turn based may be more strategic, real time usually is a lot more fun. Unfortunately, walking into battle and having 4 of your units destroyed in 10 seconds is ridiculous, especially when you only have 5 units for the mission. Even though the graphics were disappointing, as will later be shown, I did want to give the gameplay a chance, but considering that the mission was on the easiest level, and I had the best technology, having the mission end in failure about a minute after it started kind of detracted from my view of the game. I would hate to see what a hard mission is like, but even with the unreasonably hard difficulty, the control of the units was pretty much point and click, except for the fact that the units stayed in formation, which is rarely done in real time strategy games. Another bad part of the game was that the units needed to be told to attack time and time again, and they had to be moved close to the enemy. They don't move to range or anything, they just sit there and usually die. Even though the game looked promising, the gameplay was very disappointing.
Graphics:
The graphics were good looking in one sense, and really bad in another. In the good aspect, the still graphics were nice looking and the menus were done very well and futuristic looking, but due to the graphics engine or whatever, during combat, everything did not look good at all. At normal resolutions with a fast computer, the game was choppy, and why that occurs is beyond me because the game is 2D and not particularly detailed enough to warrant a huge amount of processor time. When in 640x480 mode, which ran smooth, the view screen was small and the graphics looked really bad. The explosions looked even worse, and considering the fact that thirty seconds into the game you are pretty much destroyed, it didn't help to have it all look really bad. The weapon effects were really bad too, especially at the "low" resolution of 640x480. I'm used to seeing those kinds of graphics at 320x200.
The only good graphics were the menus and the movies, which were both very nice and fit the game well. Unfortunately, due to the graphics engine, the rest of the game was brought down quite a bit.
Sound FX:
Just about everything in the game had sounds, from the mission details to the computer that talks to you during training. All of the vehicles and Hercs had their own little sounds, which were cute, but didn't make up for the graphics at all. An interesting part of all the sounds was that the game would talk to you and tell you about how to train and what mission was coming up, which did add to the game, but not too much. Since having a computer speak during a game is starting to become common place, CyberStorm 2 wasn't breaking any ground.
The music was really upbeat and had a kind of techno/rock mix to it, which is sure to please anyone who is into real time strategy games. While not classic music, it still did its job, but due to what was being seen on the screen, it wasn't able to grab much attention.
Overall:
CyberStorm 2: Corporate Wars had a nice idea, but failed to achieve its goals of being a real time strategy game. The turn based strategy was okay, with nothing to brag about, but with the poor graphics engine and average everything else, the entire game failed to live up to its potential. Even with promising ideas of both real time and turn based play, the game lost a lot of ground with its incredibly hard gameplay and substandard graphics, which was very disappointing. Therefore, anyone who likes the StarSiege universe might get a kick out of the game, but any hardcore strategy, real time or turn based, will be sorely disappointed.
People who downloaded Cyberstorm 2: Corporate Wars have also downloaded:
MissionForce: Cyberstorm, Dark Legions, The, Fire Department: Episode 3, Custer's Last Command, MechCommander Gold, Conquest of Japan (a.k.a. Samurai: Way of The Warrior), East Front 2, Company of Heroes
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