After a crazy dream one night, you need to head on your way to work. You are helping to develop copies of humans so that they might live on forever amongst an ever changing city.
Cyber City 2157 is… a mess. That’s about the nicest way for me to say about what I experienced during my time with the game. Even after reading it and going for a good amount of endings, I’m still not sure what to actually make of it. The story feels a lot like a major acid trip, and the graphics really help add to that.
So when you first start Cyber City, you are greeted with a scene about a space shuttle launch. You’ll follow this story as the shuttle launches, the antenna’s fail to deploy, and an astronaut has to go outside to try and free them. After a bit, you find out that this was just a dream, and now you’ll need to follow your nameless protagonist through his day. This will include getting a step-by-step of how he does everything – from having a breakfast to spending a break to closing the room when you’re done with work. After all of this nonsense, you are treated with even more nonsense, as well as the introduction to choices of what you want to do!
So just to point it out, no, I’m not having issues with my grammar. What I was quoting from is what your character does throughout the day and is pretty much quoted directly from the game. The English in Cyber City 2157 is absolutely horrendous. While the story is already all over the place, the fact the English is so hard to understand at times really does not help matters.
Something Emma (one of our reviewers here at The Backlog) recently told me was that when you are translating into English, you translate into bad English first and then translate into good English. While many games seem to miss that crucial second step, this game especially seemed to have skipped it. As I have said many times in past reviews, if you are writing something that relies so heavily on the text to tell the story, make sure you proofread it. Get a good translator and proofreader and make your work actually readable. Time and time again I see games fail to do this, and it just hurts formats like Visual Novels so much when you don’t do so.
As far as sounds go in Cyber City 2157, they really aren’t memorable at all. They also sometimes don’t feel like they fit the scene, and more often than not I often caught myself wondering “haven’t I heard this before?”, so it’s possible that the sounds were pulled from some stock place.
The graphics in Cyber City 2157 are definitely unique, and are also definitely uniquely brutal on your eyes. The description on the store states that the graphics are meant to be a “simulation” of old systems and monitors, mainly the Commodore 64 and MSX. While I’m not quite old enough to have memories of these systems, within Cyber City they are extremely harsh on your eyes while you’re trying to read.
If you’re up for an absolute nonsensical story that will go from rambling about one’s day at work to wandering in a graveyard (or not, you might choose to not go there), then maybe you’ll be interested in this game. I mainly took on the game as I was interested in the premise of it, but now that I’m here looking back on it, the game wasn’t that enjoyable of an experience. The story is just far too much nonsense for my taste. Oh, and did I mention that there’s randomly Buddha? Yeah, there’s randomly Buddha on one of the endings of the game.
Cyber City 2157 Review Score
1.5/5
The graphics, especially when moving, are really harsh on the eyes while one is trying to read. It’s also really hard to stay focused on reading what is written due to the horrendous English present.
I would like to thank the publisher for providing me with a code for the game for review purposes.
*Please note that some updates were done to fix some of the English present between my playing of this and the posting of this review. I did a quick scan of a few scenes and I still spotted a lot of issues.
