KIBORG: Arena is a free piece of Arkham-style fighting where John Protagonist has a cybernetic organism with fists

KIBORG: Arena feels like a throwback in a few ways that I quite liked. It's a free prologue to the upcoming cyberpunk fisticuff game KIBORG. The arena is a big room where you get to pummel a bunch of enemies as a big guy. You have to hit a gong between waves to trigger the next one, and that felt like a nice preemptive nudge to me that every problem you encounter in Kiborg can be solved by swiftly moving your fist at offensive objects, and that turned out to be not so wrong.

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Well, mostly. The first of the aforementioned throwbacks is the rhythmic combat of the cloak-and-dagger series that began with Batman: Arkham Asylum, with the addition of the charmingly homework-copier Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor. Well, imagine me doing the throat thing while writing 'Mordor'. There's a lot of timed, telegraphed parries, and space for you to weave in some melee combos in between. But I think the cohesive vibe of the thing goes back even further than that. The 'big bald guy leads a prison planet resistance effort' setup immediately reminded me of Escape From Butcher Bay, but mainly there's just a subconscious 2000s action-game feel about it all. I'm not sure there's enough here to award the ur-7/10 of the past, but that's the overall impression.

From what I can tell, this is Moscow-based Sobaka Studio’s first foray into third-person action after a series of top-down shooters, and I think they get a fair amount of it right. Enemies don’t seem to attack as often as the Arkham games or Shadow Of Mordor, and you don’t have that safe, so the fisticuffs aren’t quite as fluid. Still, the violence is chunky, meaty, and few other words that could describe good game combat or top-notch cat food. There’s a big upgrade tree and scoring system to keep you invested in the arena, and a range of brutal weapons, each with unique movesets. My favourite is the dual-wielding clubs, but the ‘shovel’ is a close second.

To restore some of the fluidity that was missing, there's a dash boost for both your heavy and light attacks, allowing you to slide around the arena and land a solid kick to the general face area. This is the best area! There's also a lousy pistol, but I'm not going to use that when I've got a shovel, am I? The ranged enemies are also more of an annoyance than an interesting challenge, forcing you to abandon your flow to flail around like a crazed raccoon. Oh well. It's free here anyway, so you don't lose much by taking a pop. Warning: The tutorial froze a few times for me, so maybe you can just dive right in and press buttons until something dies. Most of it adds up.

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