KIBORG: Arena is a free slice of Arkham-style combat starring a John Protagonist-ass punchy cyborg

rockpapershotgun.com:

KIBORG: Arena feels like a throwback in several ways that I quite enjoy. It’s a free prologue to the upcoming cyberpunk puncher KIBORG. The titular arena is a large room in which you, a large man, bash a large amount of enemies. You have to punch a gong between waves to trigger the next, and this struck me as a nice pre-emptive nudge that every problem you face in Kiborg can be solved by rapidly moving your fist towards offending objects, which turned out not to be too far off the mark.

Well, mostly. The first of those aforementioned throwbacks is the rhythm combat from the series of cape-em-ups that started with Batman: Arkham Asylum, with a little bit of charming homework-copier Middle Earth: Shadow Of Mordor mixed in. Uh, just imagine I did the throat thing when I wrote ‘Mordor’. There’s a lot of timed, telegraphed parrying going on, with space for you to weave melee combos in the interim. But I’d say the cohesive vibe of the thing goes back even further than that. The “large bald man leads a prison planet resistance effort” setup immediately reminded me of Escape From Butcher Bay, but there’s mainly just a sense of an unselfconscious 2000’s action game about it all. I’m not sure there’s enough here to award the ur-7/10 of yesteryear, but that’s the general impression.

As far as I can tell, this is Moscow-based Sobaka Studio’s first foray in third-person action after a series of top-down shooters, and I think they’ve got a commendable amount right. Enemies don’t seem to attack as frequently as the Arkham games or Shadow Of Mordor, and you don’t have that vault, so punch-ups don’t flow as smoothly. Still, violence is chunky, meaty, and a few other words that can describe either good game combat or premium cat food. There’s a huge upgrade tree and scoring system to keep you invested in the arena, and a slew of brutal weaponry, each with unique movesets. My favourite is dual bats, although “shovel” is a close second.

To help add back in some of that missing