Zholistic 最近的评测

similar to the first, you build a factory which takes in enemies and produces loot, upgrading your factory along the way

The Cycle: Frontier is an ambitious game with compelling iterative gameplay which ultimately falls short due to incredibly shallow game systems and lack of reason to play over better and more rounded-out experiences elsewhere. Alongside my game time I played ~50 hours in the beta (pretty much nothing changed).

I’ll talk about the positives first:

- The arrive-loot-escape-with-loot game type (extraction game) is very compelling when you encounter other players and have loot on the line, leading to tense confrontations and butt-clenching gameplay moments. Each drop is its own little story and you never really know how it will play out. Really there’s only this and Tarkov around at the moment for this kind of gameplay loop.

- Graphics-wise the game is beautiful with good immersive environments and set pieces - being stuck in the storm is a very tense experience or having the meteor land near you can be exhilarating.

- Solo play can be very immersive where stealth is a rewarding mechanic once you learn enemy AI behaviour (although sometimes feels their targeting is odd).

- Some of the guns feel good to fire some of the time.

The above positives, however, are let down by:

- Simple bordering on banal progression systems. The ‘quests’ are little more than repetitive tasks which scale toward punishing as you unlock more. You are rewarded for task completion with more tasks to complete, often the same ones and often they are really annoying tasks (stash grenades yay). Why are you upgrading your gear? You’re fighting the same monsters over and over in the same locations (more on that below).

- The loot you escape with, while early on you feel is valuable, is actually just to upgrade systems to escape with more loot to upgrade more systems. It’s an incredibly shallow system which doesn’t leave room for player choice outside of what gun you bring.

- Once the idea of loot being valuable is pierced, and your suspension of disbelief is gone, the game devolves into mediocre PvE (fight the same five enemies hundreds of times!) and annoying PvP (get sniped to half health, forced to run away with the choice of two pathways due to lackluster map design, get spammed with grenades with no recourse).

- The PvP should be discussed more here, as it is really quite bad compared to pure PvP games due to the map design (funnels you into few paths, punishes your approach options). The weapons fall into very few archetypes and are fun to use for a bit, but you feel they are deliberately lacking to keep pushing you up the loot treadmill. Putting attachments on weapons makes them feel baseline okay, but requires navigating through a bunch of annoying menus where all, say, foregrips look the same but don’t go on everything (maybe more icons? another shallow system). Getting the jump on someone is mandatory, you can take out squads as a solo, but it never feels like you had a good fight, you just feel relieved that it’s over and like you either cheesed them or were cheesed.

- Story is non-existent. Three factions feel cool when you walk in the first time, the fiftieth time are just different colours and accents and handing out slightly different fetch-quests. No flavour to them which isn’t also shallow. “You’re a prospector!” fails to keep you engaged. Compared to say, Deep Rock Galactic, where the lobby section is full of things to do and enhances the game-world with immersive story elements.

- Map is small once you’ve played for a bit. Similar places, similar routes, similar extractions.

So ultimately I can’t recommend The Cycle at this time, because while it is somewhat fun and a unique experience for maybe 30ish hours, once you realise how shallow pretty much every system is, you realise you could be playing better things with your time. The game is best played solo, dropping with white gear, running a farming route in Jungle or similar, and rolling the dice on extraction.

You play a moving factory which takes in monsters and outputs currency, which you can use to improve your moving factory. Honestly the best factory game I've played - hundreds of different ways to build your factory and improve its efficiency.