Kiborg Review

Kiborg showed up on the Xbox store with an over-the-top trailer and informative demo. Thick-moustached Morgan is a big, beefy man that is all about punching monsters in sprays of gore and disconnected limbs. The demo promised that it wouldn’t just be meaty punches and kicks but also chunky guns. This kind of potential always gets me going as I hope for another game that comes close to nailing the Dead to Rights: Retribution satisfaction of uppercutting one person and then shot-gunning another.

Played in third-person perspective, the player controls Morgan as he lands in a gameshow/prison/science experiment(?). The objective is clear; smash his way through arenas, pick up weapons, upgrades, and currency (for per-run purposes and meta progress) and fight through 3 bosses to get to the top of the tower and win. Along the way, Morgan is taunted by Volkov who gives off “We have Peter Stomare at home vibes”, and helped by a mysterious woman.  

If Morgan gets killed by enemies, or taken down by one of the trap rooms, he is returned to the main hub with all upgrades and weapons removed to spend the currency he collected.

There is a large upgrade screen that has a lot of the standard things like more health and more damage, but there are also new combos, upgrades to the implant system (more on that later)and ways to dual wield melee and guns.

The combat can be incredibly fluid with the array of standard and heavy attacks, spin attacks (for crowd control), as well as blocking and parries. There is a key feature too – a leap – which sends Morgan hurtling across large distances towards the nearest enemy. It is a good mechanic to keep the combat going, I felt like a killing machine when it worked but then a soggy paper bag when it didn’t. Those times when I was ineffectual were too frequent, especially during some of the frantic later fights.

Adding weapons and guns to this mix does freshen up the way the game is played and helps distinguish Kiborg from most other 3D brawlers. The fact that it manages to integrate each of these meaningfully is very good. The melee weapons add another layer of stats and boosts to your attack (for example inducing Bleed, Poison, or Freeze), with the caveat that they have durability and need to be used at the right times.

The ranged weapons are divided into two types – side arm and primary. The side arm has infinite ammo and works as an add-on to your melee, the ammo is infinite but to reload it requires fighting enemies. The primary weapons are much more powerful but require aiming and have very limited ammo, in some runs, depending on your upgrades, you’ll be looking to boost this supply for boss battles and tougher random enemies that spawn in some arenas.

As mentioned, they are clever additions and due to the run-based play, it is down to the player to know when to bring these abilities to the fore, pointedly though they never completely supersede the core melee in utility.

On top of these systems is the implant and mutation upgrade. As Morgan goes through arenas implant (and later implant upgrades) will be offered – these have a striking visual impact on the main character with body parts like the spine, heart, head and limbs, get replaced with cyborg attachments. By the end of most runs Morgan will no longer be human and instead a walking machine. These offer things like extra shock damage, a way to regenerate health, or confer bonus on the number of shields you have, or mutations that are currently active. The mutations come with big bonus that also have draw backs, for example one might let you do 40% extra damage but all enemies explode on death, another might give you 25% more health but reduce ranged attack by 10%, and so on

It takes a little while to get going and there will be a number of false starts, but by the time I beat Kiborg on the standard difficulty (the first of five) Morgan’s implants allowed me to summon two heavily levelled helpers, I had a huge armour bar that could be regenerated by killing enemies, and a series of combos that punched through blocking, all while my dodge now generated trails of flames.

All of the tough bosses were now cake walks. This isn’t a negative in my opinion, I have respect for games that are not afraid for you to create broken builds.

That said, Kiborg has more than broken character builds, it also just has plenty of other broken things.

My clunky old Xbox Series X gets loud now, and occasionally it will crash but Kiborg has repeatedly taken it to a new level with a warning message about the imminent overheating of my console while it sounds like a jet engine. I’ve tried it out on another Xbox and didn’t have the same problem so if your console is not ageing you should be fine. I am just curious about the optimisation on the game given that it does not seem that taxing.

More general of a problem is the camera, it often won’t track the combat the way I hoped, getting stuck behind larger character models, or walls. It becomes more of a threat than most enemies when fighting.

There is a lot of minor collision issues too, nothing too grueling, but it shows a lack of polish when it is so obvious.

Speaking of polish, the English localisation is off. I liked some of the jarring incongruities in Volkov’s monologues as I felt it gives him an otherworldly feel. However, there is confusing English in implant and weapon descriptions, and straight up strings still in Russian for some screens.

For all the inspiring parts of Kiborg it just doesn’t feel like it is fully finished. I do look forward to whatever the development team, Sobaka Studio, does next as they do know what makes a good Roguelite and how to give combat the kind of heft that makes it fun to smash your way through.  

Conclusion

Kiborg has crunchy combat and a fantastic sense of adventure to its progression system. Anyone looking for a character action game that delights in the absurd should give it a try. That said, you will need to be content to deal with the unfinished nature of some aspects.