The Cycle: Frontier Review

Y: Sooo… The Cycle: Frontier.

H: We played a couple hours yesterday, and you played a few games before that.

Y: Yeah I played a few games before you got on and the day before too.

H: Did you enjoy it?

PvPvE and Overall

Y: The game is quite interesting. The PvPvE format, the sci-fi setting – getting dropped onto a planet, doing your objectives and then extracting out. It’s a nice format.

H: I don’t like that, PvPvE is so stressful. it’s like you have to fight off these AI and then you have to fight people on top of that – that’s so stressful.

Y: I guess battle royale style games like this can get quite stressful. One thing that I found lacking was the gunplay. The recoil and shooting mechanics didn’t feel as smooth and it just didn’t feel that clean.

H: Can’t say I agree there, it was decent for me. But I found the tutorial to be too simple, so when we played the actual game together it was a lot more difficult.

Y: Yeah I was playing solo at the start and it was easier – if you ran into someone and you either killed them or ran away that was it. When we played as a duo we went up against other duos and they always seemed to have some big brain coordinated stuff. You see one person, you run away, and while you’re running you meet their teammate coming from the other side of the map and that’s game over.

H: Oh yeah, like you lose everything basically.

Economy: The Vicious Cycle

Y: While I found the game pretty interesting, the fact that you lose everything was what I really didn’t like about this game. Unlike other battle royales where you pick up everything after you’ve been dropped in, for The Cycle you brought everything in – whether it was guns, armor, stims and even ammo. It was all funded by you and if you died you got none of that back (more or less).

H: You ended up with less than when you started.

Y: That was the most brutal part of the game for me. I was on around 50k from the new player balance and some of the starting missions, and then I lost half of my money from a number of bad rounds, and then completed missions to go back to around 51k. Then I lost it again to less than 25k. Essentially it’s up and down but the lows just get lower, and I don’t see the missions getting any easier – which I don’t think is very sustainable. How was your experience with that?

H: I can’t say too much since I only got to play for a couple of hours. I literally didn’t extract at all except once where I did nothing and went straight to extraction. I like the idea – the missions and buying stuff was pretty cool. In theory at least. But it was very, very hard. It would’ve been very fun if it was just PvE but just a bit harder, or if you could see other people but they were there supporting you and not trying to kill you. By the end I felt motivated to play again to try to extract properly just once, but then you uninstalled the game. It’s too stressful to play alone.

Y: Sure, if it was a more difficult PvE I probably would’ve stuck with it. But people are just harder to predict. There were a few times where I ran up a staircase or turned a corner and got shot and that was it. A few thousand credits worth of equipment in just a few seconds, and I thought that was pretty brutal. Even the basic sniper is a one-hit headshot kill for anyone with the common or no helmets. One time when we were trying to extract you got hit in the body and I think that took out like 6/8 of your health in one go, and then the guy ran by with his secondary and you were gone by the first bullet – and that was just a green weapon as well. And the chance for that to happen is relatively constant throughout the whole game so for less technically skilled players like us it’s not that rewarding.

Closing Thoughts

Y: I don’t know, it was a frustrating game.

H: It definitely was, but it was a good experience – I haven’t really played that PvPvE kind of game before. And the graphics were really nice, I enjoyed that.

Y: It was fun when we weren’t dying.

H: Stressful the whole time. I did enjoy it and at the end I would’ve continued playing if you wanted to.

Y: But I uninstalled it.

H: So I uninstalled today.

Y: I think if friends were playing together and they were decent at shooting, they’d definitely be able to enjoy this game. But for newer players or even players who learn slowly, it’s a tough new player experience with unforgiving economy.