If you know this channel, you may have guessed that I’ve always tended to have a weakness for roguelike titles of just about any flavor. I know not everyone appreciates them, but for me there’s a quality to them that usually reminds me of old arcade titles, where I could just put in my quarter and continue to get better and better, pushing further and learning more every time I played. Sure, it isn’t a perfect analogy, and things like meta progression can to some degree substitute for actual skill in some cases, but it’s my observation and I’m sticking with it. What I usually find most exciting though is when developers apply it to new genres or in ways I haven’t yet seen. That’s definitely the case with KIBORG, a 3D mix of brawling, loads of weapons, technological enhancements, and quite a bit of blood that simply hits differently and has managed to suck me in.

Playing through what feels almost like a television show of the possibly not-so-distant future, with each run you’ll simply try to survive an onslaught of enemies big and small, traps, bosses, and general insanity. How you do this will partially be up to your preferred style of play, but you’ll quickly learn that adapting to whatever you’re given is the real name of the game. While I tend to prefer brutal combos and outright lethal melee weapons, sometimes you’re given hardware or cybernetic enhancements that will require you to change things up and favor a mix of fists and guns that absolutely do devastating damage when used well. While it takes a little time, once you wrap your arms around all of the game’s different systems, and have invested some winnings into key areas in your skill tree, you can absolutely have some fun being a juggernaut of destruction.

While the game really grew on me, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t struggle to find some areas where it could obviously use some work though. The first ties to a personal pet peeve and that’s wasted time. It simply takes too long to get from area to area, and it doesn’t help that figuring out where the exit for the current area isn’t always as easy as it should be. Just every run I could feel the few minutes lost having to move around in the environment when simply being teleported around could have trimmed that down substantially. You will unlock the Arena at some point, which keeps the action compact, but since you start out with just your fists that’s also a much harder endeavor for sure. The second issue is that while you can position the camera pretty well however you like, I do wish it would simply stay at a more consistently high angle, since it was often easy to take hits from people shooting or coming at you from behind, and a slightly more top-down view could likely help with that. The last has to do with the pretty substantial tech tree and unlocks in general. While perhaps you could leave the overall grind taking roughly the same amount of time, throwing people a bone earlier on could really help cut down players getting frustrated and giving up.

The game can be a real challenge, and getting to the point where you unlock enough to make it all start feeling more beatable would really help. You’ll get there, but I’d say this title has a slower curve than many, and that’s a shame since once you start cooking it’s a load of fun. It could absolutely use some work in terms of polish and presentation, but as always I’m about gameplay and something fresh first and foremost, and that’s one particular element that KIBORG delivers on nicely.