838th played so far
Genre: Action
Platform: Arcade/Dreamcast
Year of Release: 1998
Developer: Sega AM 2
Publisher: Sega
I think today’s game has one of the longest titles on the list, as well as one that has some of the more random words thrown together – I don’t expect tangrams to feature at all in the game. Instead, this seems to be a fighter of some sort, heavily featuring mechs and all that. When we played a trial game of this to see whether it was working on our Dreamcast.
Our Thoughts
Cyber Troopers felt like quite a bland arena fighter. Yeah, it’s cool to have mechs here and fight each other, but the whole thing felt like a pretty standard fighter that was difficult to control. The arcade game was a twin stick shooter, but as that isn’t an option on the Dreamcast controller, the port’s controls feel difficult. Movement is on the D-pad and other actions are on the thumbstick, which feels really unnatural. Even more difficult, in a 3D game like this, is the lack of free look. Enemies jump all around, but it’s hard to find out where they’ve gone and to find and aim at them afterwards. It becomes a constant problem and it takes the speed out of the game while constantly frustrating you as well.
I believe they released specific controllers for this – they certainly did for some of the later ports – but we obviously didn’t have that here. Beyond that, there didn’t seem to be any other stand out features, or even a story mode or such worth talking about. There are a lot of complexities, but in the end it doesn’t end up contributing to the game.
It was the name, more than anything else, that got my interest in this, and it would be lumped in with the other fighting games otherwise. It’s worth to see, but the controls are enough to remove anything else that would stand out in the game.