Maximum Letdown: Cyborg Justice (Genesis)

Sega’s Cyborg Justice for the Sega Genesis has in interesting premise: You (and a friend is playing co-op) can build a customizable cyborgs and pit him against an onslaught of enemy cyborgs. However, an interesting premise alone won’t help your game, especially if the gameplay is as dull, frustrating, and repetitive as it is in cyborg justice. You play as a human who has been transformed into a cyborg against their will. Now you must escape the cyborg’s planet, battling waves of identical looking cyborgs on the way using generic combat moves.

At the start of the game, you build your robot by selecting a body, arms, and legs. While this is a novel idea, most of the parts are for cosmetic purposes only and there are only a few that are actually useful. Then you do battle against other cyborgs that are built the same way, and often times you can’t tell who is your robot and who is the enemy. They attack you two at a time throughout several bland backgrounds. You can rip parts off enemies, but the enemy AI is ridiculously cheap and frustrating. It is literally the move-to-the-right beat em up repetitiveness at its worst. With the clunky controls that make things that should be as simple as ‘jumping’ a chore, Cyborg Justice is one of the worst examples of wasted potential. While the DIY character creation was ahead of its time (especially for a 16-bi title), the boring levels and difficult controls make the game itself an epic fail. Maybe it will be a Virtual Console game, maybe it won’t, but frankly, I could care less.