A total blast of a giant-mech shmup / beat-em-up hybrid.
For all you ZeroRanger fans, it's clearly a massive influence on that game, and it's easy to see why: the melee action here feels so rad. There is no collision damage whatsoever in Cybattler, so you can just careen around the entire screen slicing other mechs in half, busting up asteroids, taking out gigantic battleships, you name it. You're also equipped with a gun of course, which behaves slightly differently in every level, and you're able to both free fire and strafe with it in order to deal with larger, more dangerous clusters of enemies.
That's about where the fundamentals end, but there is so much secret arcade BS going on with this game. To sum it up... there is a special bonus to be had in the first four stages, each by completing a different series of tasks--and, if you get ALL of them, Cybattler rewards you with a massive advantage to get through the very difficult final levels:
In stage 4, by shooting a certain spot in an unassuming part of the terrain, you get a shield that can be activated with a fighting-game input, the number of charges of which depend on how many other special stage bonuses you collected in 1-3. Stage 1 you have to kill a certain cluster of enemies, stage 2 you have to complete without using your gun a single time (!), and stage 3 you have to keep a gigantic shoulder cannon alive through the boss. How people discovered these things back in the day, I have no idea, but luckily we have the internet now, so we can skip all of the discovery and get straight to the fun.
What's cool is, it feels eminently possible to clear the game without acquiring the shield and all of its charges. It's just there as this tantalizing mega-easter-egg that maybe someone could get by accident, and then tell their friend, and set off a chain reaction of players quarter-dumping to try to figure it out. It's complete arcade-brain nonsense, but in this case I kind of love it.
For all you ZeroRanger fans, it's clearly a massive influence on that game, and it's easy to see why: the melee action here feels so rad. There is no collision damage whatsoever in Cybattler, so you can just careen around the entire screen slicing other mechs in half, busting up asteroids, taking out gigantic battleships, you name it. You're also equipped with a gun of course, which behaves slightly differently in every level, and you're able to both free fire and strafe with it in order to deal with larger, more dangerous clusters of enemies.
That's about where the fundamentals end, but there is so much secret arcade BS going on with this game. To sum it up... there is a special bonus to be had in the first four stages, each by completing a different series of tasks--and, if you get ALL of them, Cybattler rewards you with a massive advantage to get through the very difficult final levels:
In stage 4, by shooting a certain spot in an unassuming part of the terrain, you get a shield that can be activated with a fighting-game input, the number of charges of which depend on how many other special stage bonuses you collected in 1-3. Stage 1 you have to kill a certain cluster of enemies, stage 2 you have to complete without using your gun a single time (!), and stage 3 you have to keep a gigantic shoulder cannon alive through the boss. How people discovered these things back in the day, I have no idea, but luckily we have the internet now, so we can skip all of the discovery and get straight to the fun.
What's cool is, it feels eminently possible to clear the game without acquiring the shield and all of its charges. It's just there as this tantalizing mega-easter-egg that maybe someone could get by accident, and then tell their friend, and set off a chain reaction of players quarter-dumping to try to figure it out. It's complete arcade-brain nonsense, but in this case I kind of love it.