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Review:

8th May 2004:
Cy Girls
They appear in the night, ladies who clean up after the terrorists, ghosts rarely seen. Identified only by the CG logo and the nickname rumour gives them. Cy Girls.
Posted by Chris Snook - PlayStation 2 - UK and Europe

Cy Girls is an unusual game in many respects. Firstly was inspired by a set of collectable models made by the Takara Corporation of Japan. Secondly you play two characters on two separate disks each following the same story arc but parallel to each other. Finally the distinctive realisation of the Cyberspace environment and why your characters are wanted.

Set sixty or so years in the future the world has changed quite a bit and yet remains eerily recognisable. It is a few years after the first great catastrophe of the 21st century, an event later called 'Damnation Monday', the day where all sources of power on the planet failed and in the chaos whole governments and economies were decimated and wiped out. It has taken fifteen years to recover and the world is still fragile.

Reports emerged once in a while of mysterious female figures who arrived at major crime and terrorism site, more often cyber-related, who mop up the remains and then vanish into the night once more, ladies whose sole markings are a stylised CG - people have since started to refer to them as Cy Girls.

Each character, Ice and Aska have a disk each. On both disks there is a short intro before the title screen, where you pick difficulty and set your options. Next is the introduction explaining about 'Damnation Monday' before it rolls into a very nice, cinematic titles sequence that owes a lot to the recent Charlie's Angels movies. From here on in everything depends on which character you have chosen.

Ice is a cool and calm expert in the use of firearms of all kinds, ranging from pistols to man portable missile launchers and anything in between. Aska is a fully trained ninja, who uses her athletic abilities to get in close to her enemies before dispatching them with her katana, each requires a different approach to how they complete their respective missions.

After another cut scene sequence, in order to provide some background and to set up the mission you are to perform next you dive on in. The first mission for each is a training mission, fairly simple and with a tutorial added in to show you how to do things.

Aska's first mission is to infiltrate the ninja hideout of her father's killer, along with her brother, who acts as her guide she is to find the mainframe and gain information from cyberspace by 'diving in'. Ice's starting task is to enter into the NetJustice building in Argentina and wipe records that are being used to sell off information of people. Again by diving in and accessing cyberspace. For both there is a cyberspace tutorial that prepares you for your first dive. It is here you find out that both girls have an unusual ability - they can dive in raw, literally transferring their consciousness into Cyberspace (or Cy-D as it is also referred to) directly, with no need for a buffer program.

With each disk holding 20 missions and with the initial missions taking about an hour each to complete there is plenty of gameplay here, woven together with a nice interleave of story threads that start as one thing and slowly expand out into something bigger, more global and infinitely more dangerous that mere revenge or the desire to prevent information monopolisation.

Animation is smooth and reflects each of the girl's abilities to the full, with fading effects as you look into the distance that blurs as you move rapidly at, surfaces that reflect nicely your image and water that smoothly moves. Cy-D is also rendered impressively, with an austere but smooth representation that reflects some vision of what viewing information with nothing but your mind could be like.

One area of concern is the sound, everything is crisp and delivered in Dolby Pro-Logic but there is a limit to how well a sound looks before it becomes sparse. Voice acting too is functional, with at times the actors sounding as if they are reading from the game itself with pauses as the data moves onto a new page, adding a series of unnatural pauses to whole speeches - this is not helped by scripting that makes you cringe at time, Aska's brother at one point exclaims 'An oven cooker!' and later remarks constantly when you have found out why it is important, that he 'did not know that an oven cooker could be rigged in such a confounding manner'. Shades of Gill's lock-pick in Resident Evil 2. Accents also are variable, some are spot on, others sound unsuitable to the character they represent. Music however is very good, with a rocking track for the intro's and titles and an unobtrusive score for the actual levels it helps add to the feel of who and what you are.

The control method at first is fiddly but once used to is smooth and responsive and allows for impressive manoeuvres. There is duplication of functions that seem to be there more to be there than for any reason and the secondary weapon selection system can be a pain, mostly when in a fight. The placement of the show map button as L3 (the analog stick) is a problem when you are in a frantic fight, with the map popping up as you try to control your character, thankfully it can be disabled in the options.

Cy Girls is impressive, with Aska being able to run along walls and performing moves right out of Ninja Scroll, however it is also a game of two halves.

Enjoyment is going to depend on which disk you play first. If it is Ice's disk then the initial response is nothing special, another female orientated third person shooter and you may not even play the second disk. However if you play Aska first then when you play Ice she will feel disappointing in comparison. Aska is that good to play and control and has so many varied moves, Ice looks bland. Which is a pity as over all Cy Girls is a good game that has potential for many replay hours. Well worth having a look.

Chris Snook

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Review Summary:

A nicely wrought game, let down by uneven voice acting and dialogue that can be irritating but buoyed up by a different approach to interleaving the story elements amongst the main protagonists. Despite the initial disparity between the characters at first glance one that should appeal to the gun bunnies and ninjas amongst us.

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Cy Girls
for PlayStation 2

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