The Cycle Review: A Welcome Change to the Battle Royale Genre
Before you click away thinking that The Cycle is just another Fortnite clone in the ever increasing number of Battle Royale games, don’t worry! This game is far from it and a nice change of pace from your typical BR games.
Now, let’s dive into why this game impressed me as much as it did.
Setting The Scene
The Cycle is based in the world of Fortuna III, a planet that is resource rich and full of hostile creatures. You are a prospector, tasked with going down to this dangerous planet to recover resources for different factions in order to increase your rank with them. However, you can only be there for a limited time due to a weather storm that wipes out any remaining prospectors who remain on the planet for too long. The aim of the game is to complete objectives and safely evacuate from the planet. But be warned, other prospectors are also planning on that too and will get violent if it means getting away safely!
PvEvP? In a Battle Royale?!
That’s right, this game’s main feature is that it is player vs environment vs player. While most BR games have you drop into a player filled world where the only objective is to find weapons and eliminate players, The Cycle flips the BR genre on its head by encouraging players to complete objectives spread throughout the map. This can range from collecting minerals to hunting enhanced wildlife and collecting their biomass for research.
You can play the game in pretty much any way you want! You can go the whole game without fighting a single player or you can hunt down the players at the top and make sure they can’t win. The variety is why I love this game! Every game can be different depending on your start. You could go all game without seeing a single player or you could be engaged in firefights throughout the entire game.
Loadouts Instead of Random Drops
Like the title says, in The Cycle instead of randoms drops on the map you make a loadout to bring into the game ranging from the guns you bring to the abilities you can have. You can bring in four guns and four abilities ranging from SMGs and assault rifles to abilities like a medical stim or a gun turret. You can build how you want to play before the game even starts!
While it does have some issues with balance of other players having better gear, it is also balanced in a way that everyone has access to the same weapon pool. The way you earn these weapons is by killing creatures to earn money or by completing objectives.
How to win
This is also a very unique feature to The Cycle. While playing, you can pick up materials for crafting new and better gear. However, if you fail to evacuate from the planet in time you will lose those materials. This makes just getting out alive feel like an achievement because you feel like you have won even if you didn’t make 1st place.
When you complete objectives and eliminate players, you earn victory points or VP. Once you complete a contract, it will level up meaning you have to collect more for the contract but you will get more VP for your efforts. While you do get VP for killing other players, it isn’t as much as you get for the higher level objectives and in the later stages of the game isn’t worth the VP.
Is it any good?
I never thought much of this game when I first looked into it. I thought it was just another BR game that would get stale after one or two games but I was actually pleasantly surprised from the get go. It’s a refreshing change from the normal formula and very easy to get into with it focusing more on PvE rather than PvP but still rewarding you for gun skill.
I would highly recommend this game for anyone either looking for something new and having 20 minutes to burn or something to invest in more time in.
