Cyberia is set in the near future of the year 2027, five years after a global economic collapse. The world is under the dominion of two opposing superpowers, the First World Alliance in the west and the Cartel in the east. Devlin, the leader of the FWA, receives word that a devastating weapon is being produced in a secret base in Siberia, referred to as the Cyberia Complex. Curious to unravel the mysteries of this weapon, Devlin pardons a cyber-hacker named Zebulon Pike (Zak) and charges him with the task of infiltrating the Complex and retrieving intel on the weapon being produced there.
Much like OverBlood, if you're on this page, it's most likely due to Game Informer's Super Replay of the game.
Not to be confused with Syberia.
This Video Game contains examples of:
- All There in the Manual: The world backstory given in the game manual makes it clear the First World Alliance aren't the "good guys" you might think they are just because they represent the Western World. This makes Devlin's betrayal at the end and Zack's Roaring Rampage of Revenge much less of an abrupt jump.
- Cool Shades: Zak wears a pair of wrap-around glasses that also augment his vision with an infrared scanner, a magnetic resonance imaging scanner, and a bio-scanner that are used to solve the game's puzzles.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: The virus vaccination sequences require you to reduce the amount of virus in a given vaccine to a "safe" percentage. However, if you're good enough to destroy all the virus, the vaccine fails to work and you die, because there was no virus sample for you body to practice against.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: To some absurd degrees. You can die by sticking your hand in a barrel, or by just taking your time in a noisy room, which apparently kills you by giving you a headache.
- Fusion Dance: Zak and Cyberia merge to become a giant purple/tin foil thing, which then flies into space.
- Guide Dang It!: The on-foot portions of the game often requires you to do certain things in a VERY exact order: do one thing wrong, and it's instant (and often hilarious) death. Fail to turn a certain way? You get shot. Enter a room and try to leave it? You get shot. Fail to run through a door fast enough? The oil rig explodes. Run out from behind some boxes instead of creeping to the edge? You get shot.
- Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: Averted during rail-shooter portion of the game- enemy craft only fire when they are certain to hit you. In on-foot portion the enemy will have no trouble hitting you, either, if you go tunnel vision on them and don't know to take cover.
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Nintendo Hard: The rail shooting parts of the game were designed to be challenging for a PC with a mouse, and can get impossibly difficult for other input methods. Huge numbers of enemies are being thrown at you almost non-stop. The aiming controls on the console version use D pad only, no analog sticks. The Game Informer replay had to switch to a Playstation mouse to continue at one point. - No Ending: After blowing up Devlin's space station, Zak falls back to earth and plunges into a mountain. Cue credits. Also counts as a Sequel Hook.
- Nuke 'em: Zak's head-bomb is powerful enough to destroy the entire complex at the end of the game.
- Oh, Crap!: When you get in the jet transport that takes you from the oil rig to the Cyberia Complex, you're assured by Devlin that it'll be easy, as the plane has a spoofed enemy Identify-Friend-or-Foe system that will easily let you past Cartel patrols, and if that doesn't work, the automated weapon systems will make short work of the enemies. Naturally, the first patrol you run into makes it clear that your IFF isn't working properly. And then your automated system announces that automatic combat systems aren't working. Then the system switches to manual control just as the enemy fighters turn to attack.
- One-Word Title: Named after the Complex where most of the action happens.
- Outrun the Fireball: Inverted. You can try, but you'll just vanish into the flames.
- The Place: named after the Complex where most of the action happens.
- Rail Shooter: The middle third of the game is spent flying a jet around on a rail shooter. The game's last two action sequences are also rail shooter levels.
- Respawning Enemies: Anytime you walk down a new passageway, take an elevator, or even try to go through a door, you have a 50% chance of being shot by enemies who magically and suddenly appear out of nowhere.
- Shout-Out: When Zak Fuses with Cyberia during the climax, it develops into what looks like a set of aerofoils around Zak that take him into space, in order to help him get revenge on Devlin on his space station. This is reminiscent of the VR aerofoils that appear during the VR video game segments of the 1992 sci-fi film The Lawnmower Man.
- Space Battle: The final stage has Zak flying into space to blow up Devlin's space station.
- Spy Catsuit: Zak wears one. Unfortunately, it's colored a very light shade of brown, making it look like he's naked, save for his giant, white boots, and battle harness.
- Stuff Blowing Up: At certain points, you can blow entire bases to kingdom come...usually by failing to do something correctly.
- The Many Deaths of You: You will die. A lot. And more often then not, in hilarious ways.
- The Stinger: During the credits, we hear a rescue team as they find Zak.
- Token Romance: Early on, you meet a guard named Gia, who then runs away as the base is attacked. After fending off the attackers, she demands Zak to kiss her
. They've known each other for about 45 seconds at that point. The player can choose to kiss her or not:- If he kisses her, Santos, the man who owns the oil rig, will have his guards taze him. Zak wakes up to an interrogation with Santos believing he led the attacking force to the oil rig; the player must escape, fight the guards, and steal the fighter Zak came to the oil rig for in the first place.
- If he doesn't kiss her, Gia angrily walks off, and Santos orders an immediate evacuation of the oil rig. The entire sub-plot above is skipped, and Zak is simply given the fighter. Your aircraft is booby-trapped either way, requiring you to defuse the bomb in both scenarios.
- Violation of Common Sense: A number of shooting scenarios come off like this, as there are instances where you need to kill one or more specific threats within your field of view, otherwise they will trigger an instant game-over death by simply flying out of your field of vision. This is in spite of said threats being enemy fighters that look indistinguishable from every other fighter you come across, and therefore could finish you off if you didn't conserve enough power for your lasers during most of your run up until that point!
- Comes up again in the penultimate shooting scenario, where you have a "nuke-zap" function (by pressing the Enter key on DOS) to prevent the nanites from Insta-killing you on the spot, but it will drain your bot's power supply faster until you don't have enough power to complete the scenario and get an instant game-over upon the power being used up. Rather, it is supposed to curb the Trial-and-Error Gameplay that is actually required to beat the scenario in question.
- Averted in the final scenario. Upon Fusion Dancing with "Cyberia" you have limitless laser shooting powers, and you just need to shoot whatever comes your way as you get revenge on Devlin for leaving you for dead in the complex.
- Why Am I Ticking?: Turns out Devlin implanted a bomb in your head before the game started, so that when you finally reached Cyberia itself, he would detonate it, taking out it, and you, at the same time.
- You ALL Look Familiar: Virtually all the guards you come across are exactly identical to each other.
- You Can't Go Home Again: The scientists of the Cyberia Complex, upon realizing an experimental virus they created had gone out of control, decided to immunize and then seal themselves within the complex for the rest of their lives in a desperate attempt to contain the virus. It unfortunately left them caught in between the nanite weapons that they also created and lost control of as well as the besieging Cartel troops.
