MissionForce: CyberStorm 

Some games are forgotten by time because they’re awful, weird, or just don’t work right. As much as I appreciate quirkier, experimental games, mainstream game-consumers usually had some credible reason not to play them. Most of the games I write about for this blog are in that vein, even perennial favorites and beloved underdogs like The Journeyman Project.

I say this to underscore how seriously I believe that MissionForce: CyberStorm is one of the best turn-based strategy games ever released, an absolute milestone for the genre that deserves a place on the same pedestal as X-COM. Nevermind that it’s the spinoff to a clunky mech combat game. Few games past or present show this kind of visionary disregard for rules, taste, difficulty, fairness, and genre conventions.

MissionForce: CyberStorm is the third game in the Earthsiege franchise, a long-running series of giant-robot games that eventually evolved into Starsiege and the shooter Tribes. Despite its lengthy taproot, CyberStorm‘s plot stands fairly well by itself. Hundreds of years into the future, humanity wages war against the Cybrids, a race of malicious AI that rebelled against their creators and self-replicated. You play as a freshly recruited ensign at Unitech, a private military contractor which fights these battles on the far reaches of the galaxy. With a meager allowance and access to only the cheapest supplies, you will need to use resources requisitioned from the battlefield to beef up your unit and take on the Cybrids. The story is told entirely through conversation logs, training videos, and lecture transcripts, an unusual faux-documentary approach that helps ground the militaristic setting.

Much like X-COM, the game is split between strategic planning and battlefield tactics.

Before each mission, CyberStorm plops you down at the Unitech HERC Base, where you manage individual vehicles and pilots. Your HERC machines need constant repairs, as well as upgrades and exchanges for any payload they carry to better suit the next battle. The level of micromanagement is extreme. Parts can be individually tweaked, exchanged for slightly altered models with different energy efficiency, or wholesale replaced with new weapons or defensive gear. Hundreds of possibilities exist for mixing and matching the dozens mech types (add a scout? Swap in a heavy?), then further rebalancing their equipment. It’s almost like calling formations for a football team… if the players could be upgraded with motion trackers, fired ballistics missiles, and were all named “Juggernaut.”

On top of this, you also manage “Bioderms,” a caste of tube-bred, mindless slave humans who pilot your HERC army. Each ‘Derm has its own strengths and weaknesses, which can be retrained (Matrix-style) to better suit the HERC to which they’re assigned. Should they falter in battle or receive damage, you can inject nerve toxins into their system that boost their performance and health at the risk of destabilizing their genes. Most Bioderms decay after a set number of missions, making them valuable commodities that need to be pushed to the brink when possible – especially the extra-strength models that Unitech awards you for good performance. You’ll form personal attachments to them, which makes it all the harder when they get inevitably flushed.

The strategic layers afforded by the separate HERC and Bioderm systems are leagues beyond the alternatives in similar army customization games like Syndicate. Often you will re-tailor your mechs to better fit a specific pilot, while sometimes you might spend a little extra money on a Bioderm with a specific strong trait that your fleet needs. To stretch the football analogy further, it would be as if each of those players had a separate smaller football player inside their heads who was responsible for motor skills.

Combat is an absolute joy thanks to all this depth. The hex-based war tactics force players to choose between defensive, evasive, and offensive actions. Each HERC unit has a finite power supply that allows it to move and shoot only so much each turn, and individual weapons have their limits as well. Almost immediately, squad tactics will pop into your head, like readjusting the shield strength of a more powerful ranged unit or moving armored but weak scouts ahead to draw fire. Enemy Cybrids worry about the unit complexity just as you do, and each side will continuously readjust its focus from cannons to shield-disabling lasers, or shifting from close-range combat to distant missile barrages. The possibilities are tantalizing. Fans have even developed an unconventional strategy based around cheap units turned into suicide bombs.

Rest assured, CyberStorm will test even a grizzled strategy veteran. The game gives you obsessively minute control of your units, leaving little room to screw up. When a unit dies, that HERC and Bioderm are dead forever, and your investments go with them. This is as expensive as it is frequent. An oversight like a misplaced shield or a poorly applied stimpack will open the door to a bevy of violent, horrific deaths. To rub this in, each time a Bioderm kicks the bucket, CyberStorm treats you to a cutscene where you watch it decay and convulse into a pile of bones and genetic goo. It’s alternately frightening and hilarious.

Honestly, the total cacophony of elements at play in the game tend to obscure the strategic depth. With so much at stake in each move, so many moving pieces to track, and dozens of variables threatening to upset the balance of the battlefield, I had frequent trouble figuring out if my missteps were because of poor strategy or atmospheric chaos. But you can play smart and safe. The challenge is resisting the temptation not to.

The mission variety deserves some praise too. Only a few types are available – such as reconnaissance, defense, and general warfare – but even those carry some variation. One mission might intentionally drop you into a hot zone filled with enemies, while another asks you to locate a distant Cybrid base. This is a decent mix, especially given their seemingly random generation and the varied atmospheric conditions of planets you might visit.

One memorable mission type requires you to bring back ore deposits while defending against waves of enemies; you get credits for any ore that’s recovered. Ingeniously, though, the ore retrieval tools take up a space in each HERC’s inventory, forcing you to balance between armaments and mission-critical supplies. Your army can bring that same equipment on any mission, allowing you to gain extra money while risking your offensive capabilities. This is a clever touch, especially early in the campaign when a smaller army means putting more on the line.

The campaign itself takes a dark, anti-corporate, gaze-at-the-horror-of-warfare arc. As your success in battle leads you up the military hierarchy, more of Unitech’s closeted evils emerge. The found-footage-style journals in cutscenes reveal that the Bioderms can think and act on their own and are not simply brainless puppets; that the Cybrid commander Prometheus is a nebulous threat that may already be destroyed; and that the specially awarded Bioderms are slave clones created from the bodies of previous commanders. All this cynicism accompanies the production of newer, stronger, and more expensive HERCs. The ending – too shocking to reveal in this post! – is a disturbing, bold statement against war profiteering.

Like the bulky single-player experience wasn’t enough, CyberStorm was one of the earlier games to include online multiplayer support. Your team from the campaign can carry over to the multiplayer versus modes, which include online play, hotseat play, and even the long-forgotten Play by Email function. Balancing features are built-in; each army receives a force rating, allowing you to reconfigure armies to ensure a fair match. The game also supports a pseudo-cooperative mode by giving you the option to include random Cybrid armies. That feature even allows you to use multiplayer as a training mode for the campaign. For a pre-StarCraft strategy game, all this is really impressive.

Apart from its dated interface and technical shortcomings compared to modern games, I can’t think of a single complaint to make about MissionForce: CyberStorm. This is a deep, highly strategic, unrelentingly dark game that time somehow forgot. The gaming powers-that-be would do well to give this one a second shot or a re-release. Sure, a sequel (CyberStorm 2: Corporate Wars) came out, but… that’s an unfortunate story for separate article.

Iffy sequels aside, this is fantastic. Play it.

Video

Tags: 1996, 90s, CD-ROM, Dynamix, futuristic, hex grid, hot seat, local multiplayer, multiplayer, online multiplayer, PBeM, recommended, sequel, Sierra On-Line, top-down, video, Windows, Windows 9x

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