Roguelikes used to be somewhat of an enigma to me. I never used to see the appeal of smashing my head against a wall over and over to progress in small increments. Then I got shown some very good ones, such as Slay the Spire, Cult of the Lamb; Heck, even Balatro! So, when KIBORG slid its way into my to-do list, I was quite excited to sit down and give it a go.
Kiborg starts off, as many games do, in a small tutorial room. All of the modern third-person classics are here: Blocking, parrying, shooting and close quarters combat. These moves are all fairly basic, but this is a roguelike. It won’t be basic for long.
The first stage quickly establishes you as Morgan Lee, a prisoner convicted of a crime he didn’t commit. To try and get out of your 1300 year prison sentence, you sign up for a twisted game show called Last Ticket, where you attempt to fight your way through hordes of enemies to get to a chopper at the end. Standard roguelike stuff, but here’s where KIBORG does something I really like.
After your first run, you’re introduced to the build mechanics. You can choose from heaps and heaps here; Increased health and shields, changing how we interact with our mutations and how they affect us and our starting weapons. The thing that I like the most here is the mutations. When you pick different ones, they physically affect the character.
Want some new legs that enhance your dodge? Your character actually gets new legs. Want a new head that increases your accuracy? Here’s a shiny new noggin. The cybernetics and the overall style of the game very much remind me of Stephen King’s The Running Man.
So, off I went again. My next few runs went a bit better. After buying myself some more permanent upgrades, such as health and the chance to find bigger higher level mutations in crates, I began to break through the enemies. They come in a decent variety. Gun wielding enemies, ones with shields, bigger beefier enemies, all of whom are fellow prisoners looking to put you down. It doesn’t hold back on the gore either. Morgan’s favorite thing is to turn these guys into jelly.
However, I must come to the elephant in the room for me; the game’s overall performance.
I’m reviewing this on a Xbox One S, so — admittedly — I am using older hardware. But this shouldn’t excuse the poor performance quality I experienced. I had a lot of dropped frames, the overall environment was very low texture, as though it hadn’t fully loaded in. In addition to that, I experienced quite a lot of input delay. Any time I tried to fire a weapon, my frames dropped into the single digits and all the enemies would teleport around as if I were playing an online game on a restaurant’s WiFi. I even had one good old fashioned freeze and crash when I tried to grab a random melee weapon from the smithy, completely ruining what was a good run up until that point.
It’s a genuine shame too, as I am confident there is a solid game with solid ideas in here. I love the customization and world building, and I really like the concept. However, poor performance has let it down — especially considering that, just 18 months ago, the Series S was 75% of the Xbox One Series install base. If the game is patched in the future, I’d love to come back and give it another shot. As is though, if you’re on older hardware, maybe avoid this one.
KIBORG is available now on Xbox, PlayStation and Steam.