Cy Girls PS2 Review

When playing Cy Girls we were left wondering if the game really did come from Konami or from somewhere much more sinister, like the burning bowels of hell. Obviously it didn’t come from the latter, although with a title that induces such misery and frustration it certainly belongs there after its probable short shelf life. Laborious puzzles, stilted controls and repetitive environments may be some of the biggest sins in the gaming book, but it’s impossible for a game to offend on so many levels, right? No it’s not.

The game comes on two discs and there are two characters, we needn’t say anymore as you are probably capable of doing the maths. The characters are pleasingly different in combat styles, there’s the gun-toting blonde, Ice and the sword-wielding ninja, Aska. Ice is our favourite, she packs firearms, – which she can make use of in various methods – and is more modern and slick in looks. Aska is for closer matters and is also able to run along walls, throw knives, use a Tenchu-like grappling hook to hoist up to elevated areas that are otherwise unreachable and deal out instant kills that are far too easily achieved.

We found the controls to be an instant burden on the game, feeling needlessly awkward and not doing the title any favours at all. Depending on the position of your intended target you have to move the camera into their direction, in able to lock on with Ice’s guns and Aska’s throwing knives. Whilst Konami’s heart was in the right place, the finished product is blighted by stilted controls, which ruins the fairly decent combat – the game just keeps getting worse from hereon.

The arduous puzzles just further solidify the fact that Cy Girls isn’t very good at all. There’s the gun and sword play and then there’s those nasty puzzles, this in mind, Cy Girls is nothing more then a frustrating title bound by overly perplexing puzzles and hidden beneath a mass of falling bodies. We like our games satisfying and even an action title that offered only an hours worth of play we would choose over this, granted it was better, and the simple case is that most of them are.

The developers have seen reason to include constantly respawning enemies, some may think this gives you something to do, whilst your bewildered brain is still up somewhere in the clouds, us? It was just another thing that got on our nerves, not forgetting to mention, in our way. Every minute gameplay mechanic seemingly wants to bring on one of those rare spurred gaming headaches.

Ice and Aska are able to dive into the virtual world to tamper with security systems and the like, here you must search out important elements and areas and then make use of your genius hacking skills to crack the system. Even here there’s viruses that attack you and are nothing more then an annoyance. At least certain skills can be brought into play to get them off your case.

You may have already guessed that we don’t like Cy Girls much at all, you would be correct as we have nothing but spite for the title – it has one of the blackest hearts in gaming that we’ve played in recent memory. If you like long-drawn out puzzles that don’t seem to make any sense and are seemingly more about luck then logic, then this may very well be your kind of title, if you only perceive such puzzles as interrupting nuisances then avoid this like the plague.

3/10