Cy Girls
- March 24, 2004 11:37 AM PST
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Is the gameplay as plastic as the action figures the Cy Girls are based on? Take a wild guess.
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Let?s Backtrack!
It?s one thing for a game to make you jump through hoops, even the same hoops over and over again as long as it?s fun. The level designs in Cy Girls have you go through each of its missions in basically the same way?you reach a point you can?t pass, backtrack to the thing you need to advance, explore the level a bit more, backtrack to advance, and endlessly repeat. Later levels pile on the complexity by closely tying together the ?virtual world? to the real one and requiring even more backtracking. It?s not very creative, but other games have made it work to some degree; Cy Girls doesn?t make it work and fails to give you any compelling reason to continue playing.
That?s not to say Cy Girls has nothing to offer because there are several features worth mentioning albeit with caveats. The graphics are quite good in spots, although repetitive backgrounds detract from the overall presentation. Effects like reflective surfaces and the look of character animations point to a respectable amount of attention to detail?Ice?s varied shooting tricks in particular are quite cool. The virtual world concept has potential and could hopefully be salvaged for another effort, but it seems only halfway executed here.
The game tries a control scheme similar to that of a first-person shooter, but it takes a lot of getting used to and never manages to feel natural. A beginner?s mode that takes care of camera angle management is offered, but it?s very clunky and often places the view in awkward positions.
Cy Ya Later
The story doesn?t need to be a masterpiece in an action game, and the voice acting can be cheesy if the game has that tongue-in-cheek feel. Cy Girls does get the wacky voice thing down and executes it well enough, but the story is so convoluted and boring that it just sucks out your motivation to find out what happens next. Further draining any enthusiasm you may have is the monotonous background music. Each corridor and hallway feels that much more similar when listening to the same tune play on and on.
You would have to be an insanely devoted fan of the action-figure line from which the characters originate and a fan of repetitive level exploration to gain any type of enjoyment from Cy Girls. It all seems like such a waste as there are ideas present that could have made a good game great, but in a bad game like this, they only manage to bump the score by a point.
