Cyber Rebellion’s battles are fun, but it’s a pretty paint-by-numbers autobattler

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SHOULD I PLAYED CYBER REBELLION?

I’ll be honest: I don’t really get the appeal of autobattlers like Cyber Rebellion. To me, they feel like digital Rube Goldberg machines designed solely to make us look at our phones. That said, this is a pretty effective one. I did eventually find myself awake at 3 a.m. powering up my team of colorful cyberpunk teens to take on another group of baddies. Play it if you’re looking for an idle game with slick (if derivative) visuals and an oddly compelling turn-based battle system.

TIME PLAYED

I’ve played about five hours of Cyber Rebellion over the last couple of days, mainly while listening to podcasts. I’ve now recruited six operatives and leveled my team of hand-selected troops up with a combination of battles and training. I’m currently in chapter three of the story mode, which is about a new commander helping to fight back against a zombifying cyberpunk disease called corrosion, which threatens to plunge the last human city on Earth into chaos. I’ve also checked out several of Cyber Rebellion’s side-modes, which tend to be minor questlines separate from the main story where it’s possible to gain additional rewards and resources.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT CYBER REBELLION?

• Visuals and sound. Cyber Rebellion doesn’t have an original look—it’s the kind of light, cartoony cyberpunk design that’s been all over the place since Overwatch first launched, and it’s heavily influenced by the style of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. That being said, the art is all quite well done. The models look great, every screen is bursting with color, and overall it’s just a fun game to look at.

• Simple but interesting combat. The battles in Cyber Rebellion are turn-based affairs that reminded me a little of Final Fantasy VII. I had a set number of action points each turn, and I could use those for attacks, drawn from the abilities I had unlocked for each character. Whether it was a single-target blast or a big area-of-effect ability, each attack had a cool animation sequence (which I could skip if I wanted to by selecting a menu option). Working out which attacks would be best to use, and in what order to use them, was decent fun—although the real determining factor in how well I did was my team’s combat number, and how far above or below the enemy’s it was.

• Cool character upgrade options. Like other hero-collecting games, Cyber Rebellion is all about upgrading characters to make them more effective members of your fighting team. I liked some of the elements of that here. Instead of simply moving up a linear upgrade path, I could use fusion to combine lower-tier copies of a hero and morph them into a new variant of the character, sometimes choosing between several options. Each of these had their own abilities and a unique look, so I had fun finding new synergies in my team whenever I had the chance to use this fusion system.

WHAT SUCKS ABOUT CYBER REBELLION?

• Aggressive monetization. I had a pretty good idea of what to expect when I started playing Cyber Rebellion, and I realize these games have a specific business model. However, I was still surprised to have a splash screen advertise a purchasable character (available for $3.99 USD) within ten minutes of starting the game for the first time. There’s a pretty decent runway of free-to-play content before hitting any walls, but the game takes a few opportunities to push microtransactions during that time.

• The story is dull. I had a hard time following the story in Cyber Rebellion, partially due to some translation oddities, but mostly because it was a bore. On paper, the idea of an encroaching horde of zombies bearing some kind of computer virus plague seems pretty cool, but Cyber Rebellion never gets around to ramping the tension up, and so I skipped through the dialogue sequences as quickly as I could in most cases. I occasionally had the option to select from two possible responses, but I don’t think these ever mattered very much.

• Confusing interface. I found it difficult to get my bearings in Cyber Rebellion’s menu system—there are a bunch of little optional modes and side stories that are arranged a bit haphazardly within the game. The R&D facility, where two series of quests took place, was found in the main story map area, while characters’ personal quests were in a completely different menu. I felt these could have been organized better, and I think that could be an issue for players who decide to stick with the game long-term and want to grind specific missions over and over.

💬 Will you be joining the cyber-resistance and cyber-jumping into Cyber Rebellion? Do you have a favorite hero-collecting game? Tell me about it in the comments!