Cstorm Review

Blood and Bone vs. Silicon and Steel

Minimum System Requirements

486 or better

Win 95

SVGA

CD-ROM

8MB RAM

It's the future. Robots have become super intelligent and are trying to eliminate humans from existence. Your job is to control a squad of HERC's, which themselves are controlled by Bioderms. Genetic creations made to fight and die. You can purchase and upgrade your HERC's and train and create new Bioderms. Choose from a variety of missions from mining ore to destroying the enemy Command center. Cyberstorm is based on the game Earthsiege and plays like X-Com.

The gameplay is fairly standard for war strategy games. Each HERC has a certain amount of energy that you can use per turn. The action is not constant as it is in Command and Conquer but the game still keeps you in your chair. At first, you will be surprised by how easy you think it is, but if you play on you'll find that it get's progressively harder. Strategy in this game is the key. You need to choose a mission that you can handle. If you choose poorly you will end up losing HERC's (which equal) and your rewards won't match your suffering. This is an excellent thinker's game, but it still has that shoot 'em up kill 'em all aspect to it, which will attract action game fans.

Sound is excellent in quality, but poor in quantity. During periods where nothing is happening, (and this occurs frequently) there is no sound. This makes the game more dull and doesn't help to suspend the adrenaline rush that we're all looking for in a game. Graphics are great in the animations and even in the game itself, but they still could have done more to make it better. A zoom feature would have been nice, as would have eliminating the grid system of movement, which makes the scenery look somewhat ugly.

This is the strategy version of the action game Earthsiege 2. If you liked Command and Conquer or X-Com, you will probably like this game...only not as much. It definately has a lot of aspects that can keep you interested and playing for hours, but it gets to that point where you turn it off and suddenly have lots better thangs to do than turn it in again. Using the multi-player capiability is a nice way to circumvent this, I'm sure. To just beat the game and get that out of the way, you should play it sloooooooooowly. While you may get bored, you won't die as easily from hastily-made mistakes. Constantly building and improving your forces is the only way to stand a fighting chance against the opposition who gets increasingly stronger.

This game is an excellent strategy game, but with the recent influx of super excellent strategy games such as Command and Conquer and Warcraft, it won't make too many headlines. Pure Strategy games like this are becoming a dying breed. Without very much action, it won't appeal to all those Doom fans that may have liked Command and Conquer or Warcraft. If you liked X-Com and didn't mind that the action was more or less animated, you will like Cyberstorm as well. Cyberstom won't make anybody's favorite game list, but you can definately have fun with it, and I think that it is worth buying. At the least, it won't be one of those games that you'll want to return the day after you buy it.