Rally Point: Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is both worth playing, and worth waiting for a little longer

Cyber Cyber, turning fight

This is The Rally Point, a regular column where the inimitable Sin Vega delves deep into strategy gaming.

Cyber Knights Colon Flashpoint does not lead with its best foot. This is easier to shrug off while it's still in early access, but I will confess some relief when I read that the Trese Brothers (It's pronounced "Trese") nudged their estimated release date back to 2025. It needs a bit longer. But I'm about ready to start recommending it.

I'm a tad biased by my love for their previous Star Traders Colon Frontiers, an interest in mercenary management, and a wish for more turn-based tactics games that aren't bloody XCOM again. That I have reservations about what CKF hasn't yet nailed down is in part a symptom of high expectations. And because despite carrying over some design ethos from Frontiers, Cyber Knights is a very different kind of game.

You start out with too many decisions, too little context, and a brief tutorial mission in which your player character and crew break out of a lab where you've just learned to touch type, thus becoming a Cyber Knight according to my granddad when he again asks how to attach a youtube. It doesn't really represent how most missions work, or dispel many assumptions. I sympathise to an extent, because CKF is rather unorthodox.

It's not an XCOM. Instead of strict grids, you move at the exact angle and distance you choose, split freely between running and the noble crouch-jog, and shoot/act/move in whatever order you please. Turns depend on individual initiative rolls, and movement and lines of sight/aim are consequently far more granular (and a little unpredictable, as it tradition). It hasn't the ballistic simulation focus of Silent Storm or Jagged Alliance either. Missed shots effectively evaporate on leaving the barrel, and though it uses a similar overwatch system, there's none of Phoenix Point's limb-severing or headshotting. Character statistics are downplayed in favour of perk unlocks, but shootouts nonetheless feel like shootouts - raw firepower is your bedrock, giving open confrontations a more grounded atmosphere than the usual XCOMalong superpower metagaming.

This middle ground extends to stealth too. Cyber Knights is a heist game, but the paramilitary smash and grab kind. Your wee gang do mercenary work for cash and favours, mostly sneaking into street gang or corporate holdings to ransack cabinets or Do A Hacking. Time and direct detection by guard or device drive up a general alert level, activating aggressive defences and summoning more and worse guards. Tripping a motion sensor or rearranging a sentry will likely take a guard off patrol to investigate, maybe finding the body, or spotting you and opening fire. Each of those bring more alerts. Flashpoint is big on snowballing escalation, as everyone within earshot calls in a guard's gunshot, then runs over to help. Your people return fire, setting off three, six, twelve more reports, pushing the alert over a threshold where more guards enter the level and call in the fresh bodies (moving bodies is on the "to do" list, though some perks already help).

With a stealth game I tend to assume that the ideal is to be invisible, that any alert brings shame upon my house. But these are not Invisible Inc.'s artful dodgers. You're a street gang, and though it's not all that punk politically, CKF absolutely expects your cyberpunks to crack a lot of heads.

You'll learn to exploit alarms. Step under a camera and splat the guard who comes to investigate. Have your soldier start blasting, raising a lot of security but drawing guards away so your unseen vanguard can ransack a cupboard. Excellently, guards can only raise alarms if they're alive at the turn's end. There's no dedicated ambush button, but multiple path-predicting and initiative-manipulating perks, and anyone can delay part of their turn, allowing a sufficiently prepared team to loudly hammer multiple guards and get away with it. Which makes it frustrating that it's not always clear exactly where some potential alarm came from.

It's also possible, through hacking, to dial alert back (and scrape out more loot) via a detailed minigame. It's engaging enough, but a little lacklustre in terms of drama or effect on the wider mission. Occasionally it causes mini-sieges as everyone protects your hacker for several turns while they open a door, or tempts you into risking more exposure to root out those last valuable files. Kicking up a high alert like this isn't as devastating as it seems, though. Causing enough chaos raises "heat" back at base, which in extremes can draw bounty hunters into invading subsequent jobs, but building the right facilities and laying low a while cools it off.

The design goal is, I think, to represent stealth as vital, but not the entirety of your tactics. If you're feeling spicy you can hit a job loud, counting on speed and firepower over waiting for the sentry to chase the shiny penny. Almost all gunfights should feature rolling, repositioning, moving towards a target or shooting your way out before reinforcements catch up. Rather than a stealth/combat binary there's room for degrees of both, sometimes simultaneously.

Points gained as characters level can add a perk to their repertoire, enhance an earlier one, or instead go on the attribute bonuses that link each perk on each class's unique, somewhat non-linear tree. Classes determine not just which attributes can go up, but add different bonuses on top. A soldier's +1 to Will raises her hit points, but the sniper's Will raises critical hit chance instead. Between dozens of perks and easy multiclassing, there's more room for designing the utra-optimised, the ready for anything, or the chaotic obscure trick shot characters the longer you play. This means you can build a weird and messy team even before adding cybernetic implants or crafting advanced weapons. Those implants are disappointingly numerical at present, though future ones will apparently include grafted weapons. No word yet on the skull gun.

Characters define how CKF plays off the job, too, as you gradually build up an empty headquarters. There's no strategic map here, no bulletin board or exclamation mark hats. Instead, you have underworld contacts. As with Star Traders, contacts offer services, rise or fall in influence, and carry personality traits, loyalties, and liabilities. Your every job comes from a specific person offering money or favours, or calling one in. Refusing an obligation might burn the bridge and alienate their friends, and there's no guarantee a rising star you've backed won't get got. Many have relationships with someone on your own team, too, who have their own loyalties and pasts.

It's intended, I think, to paint a world like Bloodnet or even Gothic: a favour economy where trust matters more than money. This is literally true to an extent, as favours can be called in for unbuyable access to services or assistance on important jobs. Meanwhile, your base has no running costs, as your people take a pirate-style cut of contract payouts instead. So far though, this side is lacking. There's little room to define your team's vibe or ideology, and your Cyber Knight often comes across as kind of a dick. In principle, all your team will have some history, so new hires mean deciding who you're willing to cross, which favours you're willing to pay back. In practice I saw little difference between factions or their opinions, and I couldn't be proactive. Job offers are clearly generated from relationships, but I can only wait for them to come in, with (almost) no ability to create my own opportunities, offer someone an olive branch, or poison someone's olives.

Certain base facilities can generate hacking jobs or new recruits, and I love that to sell anything your own team will pop up with a lead or request to help out a relative or get an old enemy off their case, meaning you get your pick of any interested buyers. But there's little sense of the world beyond your base, or even where your base is. Some traits make you safe or unwelcome in gang territories, but those territories could be on the moon for all I know. I can't court alliances, or take any kind of stance except by the inaction of letting a job expire. It's only fair to admit that its many subplots (recalling Vagrus) are incomplete in both length and number, as is the contact/faction relationship system.

I should also admit that CKF is too sturdy to qualify as "janky". Production values are not the studio's strongest suit, and the jump to their first 3D game has cost some visual style. "Budget charm" is the phrase I want to lean on, but its levels do little to stir the imagination, and its dialogue is fine. Even the (incomplete) fashions lean into an unmoving chunky Soldier Guy / neon spandex duality. It's thankfully not po-faced, edgy, or smugly ironic, but lacks the defining vibe of being cheesy or melodramatic or intense, or just... something, you know? This is not a world I think about when I'm not playing, or even very much when I am. The small crews and cyberpunk setting ought to lend your character more fire, more humanity (or disturbingly less).

Cyber Knights Flashpoint plays well enough by now to override those disappointments, and to recommend with the usual early access and "ambitious design on a budget" caveats. It's all but certain to keep improving too, with months before 1.0 and a stalwart dev team who still regularly update their older games. I have not fallen for it the way I fell for Frontiers, but my feelings have grown steadily warmer the longer I've spent with it. It may not be the revolution, but then cyberpunk never quite does get there, does it?