Cyber Knights: Flashpoint - The Trese Brothers ambitious Nu-Xcom style cyberpunk stealth game

[Alphasnail]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1021210/Cyber_Knights_Flashpoint/

Just picked this up the other day, and it's worth promoting. For those who don't know, the Trese Brothers are niche rpg devs with a reputation for updating and expanding their games indefinitely after release. This game right here marks a Great Leap Forward for them as their first 3d game and it comes out swinging. It's a tactical stealth game, loosely in the fashion of 2k X-com, where you lead a cyberpunk criminal squad and manage contacts, faction relations, and build up a larger base. The stealth system is unique, in that it's not designed for you to be completely invisible, so much as you're meant to manage the growing pressure of escalation, while accomplishing your objectives and extracting with minimal heat. There have been a few games that have attempted this sort of thing, but all of them fell pretty flat. I've only got a few hours in and it's been very impressive so far. It really has that feel, like you're cyberpunk Tony Soprano or something, choosing whether to investigate people and get leverage over them to grease the gears of your criminal operation, and even fundamental choices about who you're going to do missions for, or betray for your own benefits.

Now for some caveats and "yeahbuts". In its present state, it appears that several major branches and questlines are incomplete, ending with an explicit message from the devs, saying that they're working on it. This will likely be resolved soon, as Trese Brothers are known for delivering constant updates to their games, and expanding the content vastly for free over years. The other thing is that the interface is a bit fiddly at times, and the stats and development can be a bit confusing to grok at first. Furthermore, controller support is included, but it seems a damn mess and it's no fun trying to use a controller at all.

In summary, this game is doing something very new and impressive, and I felt the need to promote it, so that this dev team could bask in the neetbucks and glory they deserve.

 

[BiggestKai]

I played this last week. Here's what I like

• Hacking is a fun minigame that's like a mini puzzle on its own
• The favors system/your contacts is cool.
• Recoil is a very nice idea.
• I like the gunslinger class a lot.
• Heist planning is very cool especially once it starts opening up with leverage and alternate paths
• The initiative system is handled really well and it makes turn to turn planning a very fun thing to do.
• It's very much how I would have wanted a sequel to Invisible Inc to open up in terms of complexity, which at the very least puts this game at an 8/10 for me once all the big dealbreakers are fixed.

I also uninstalled it, and here's what I dislike and what I see as the dealbreakers

• Not to grafxfag too much but the game looks awful, and for a game built around cool cyberpunk heists that's a massive deal breaker to have it look like a Unity asset flip project.
• Moving around is extremely finnicky(yes even with snapping turned off) and makes every turn take way too longer than it should. For one you have no idea what your maximum movement range from a glance(you have to keep tapping at the edges of the map to start formulating an idea), you constantly have to hover the cursor from your character to other characters so you can see the chance to hit at the area you're moving to.
• In fact there's a lot wrong with the readability in the game. Off the top of my head
  • You can't tell who has what recoil until you start moving.
  • The health indicator is quite frankly dogshit
  • Optimal ranges for weapons
  • Where a camera's about to rotate to, because it just seems like it's more than happy to rotate 180 degrees at any given point instead of the 90 you'd be expecting.
  • What an enemy spawn point is
  • What each stat does seems to jump from character class to character class, off the top of my head it looks like the hacker class pretty much has "+0.X matrix AP when hacking" for just about any stat, while Cyber Knights get more damage, while gunslingers get to zoom around the place and I have no idea how or why.
• Weapons are extremely underwhelming to use, as in the sound and damage department. There's a ragdoll effect which is okay, but
  • Shotguns/melee weapons, which are the weapons you'd probably picture in your mind as being kings of close combat, don't deal that much damage and none of the weapons appear to differ in terms of AP use.
  • For the life of me I have not been able to see a sniper shot that exceeded 70% hit chance with the exception of Rhino during her recruitment mission
  • There's this part where damage is split into ballistic and pure and kinetic damage and it makes zero sense and it's not a factor when you're actually planning stuff.
• Sec AI and how AI works in the game feels very random and it makes any planning underwhelming because the big escape with the entire guard roster on your heels you've pictured in your mind is quickly ruined by the fact that in spite of the fact that you've just been in a very loud firefight, and three cameras have picked up your mad dash towards an exit, Sec AI has the brilliant idea of having active guards just very slowly comb over the opposite end of the map in an attempt to discover bodies and find missing guards, and this is the worst part of the game in my opinion. The AI in Invisible Inc was far better(and more logical) at hunting you and it made every mission a joy to escape, here there's really fuck all to the escalation level reaching double digits beyond your heat meter going up more.

This all comes with a caveat because as far as I remember having the game(which is a year ago, I bought it in early access on a discount to keep it around for the full release) it seems to be getting semi-major updates literally every other day(in the time I've had it after release it's had four big patches) so it's very likely it'll be a much better game in my eyes a year or two from now.

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

The stealth system is unique, in that it's not designed for you to be completely invisible, so much as you're meant to manage the growing pressure of escalation

I think I've seen it a couple of times before, even in strategies.
Is it a perpetual manager or do you have story missions and end goal? Because I would really like to play the x-com style base/squad strategy with nearly endless game loop.

 

[Scumlord]

Trese Brothers are niche rpg devs with a reputation for updating and expanding their games indefinitely after release.

Remember playing their mobile games a years ago on Android, which are some of the best mobile games I've ever played. They were hard as fuck but deep and all of the expansion packs were dirt cheap. They didn't just do cyberpunk games but also other genres like Sci-fi and a game similar to to that one Warhammer turn-based ship game. These are about as close as you can get to an authentic retro gaming experience these days.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Not to grafxfag too much but the game looks awful, and for a game built around cool cyberpunk heists that's a massive deal breaker to have it look like a Unity asset flip project.

Performance is comparatively shit as well. I can get over an ugly game, but an ugly game that ALSO chugs and hitches is just insulting.

 

[BiggestKai]

Performance is comparatively shit as well. I can get over an ugly game, but an ugly game that ALSO chugs and hitches is just insulting.

This seems to happen a lot during hacking, I don't know what exactly about the hacking interface that's so performance intensive but it's almost always a 40%-50% fps hit.
Also when the "enable highlights" feature is at its maximum level with the view cones that's also a performance hit

 

[Alphasnail]

I think I've seen it a couple of times before, even in strategies.
Is it a perpetual manager or do you have story missions and end goal? Because I would really like to play the x-com style base/squad strategy with nearly endless game loop.

It has multiple branching stories and I think some procedurals for a baseline. As far as I can tell, it's more of an open ended rpg like star traders was. Oh and I guess the stealth isn't wholly unique, it's more the combination of managing a criminal gang and choosing people to leverage or side with