Cyklus Review – Head, Meet Glass Window

 
If the mark of a good mobile game is never-ending replayability and a difficulty level that makes you want to put your face through a glass window, then Cyklus does its job. Eastasiasoft has given me a game that is brimming with replayability and personality; yet, it is so frustratingly difficult that I rage-quit more times than I could remember doing in the last decade of my life. 
 
If this sounds like a hyperbolic description about how difficult Cyklus is, rest assured, it isn’t. Its difficulty is masked by a game that, for all intents and purposes, is as simplistic as it can get. You pilot a spaceship shaped like a DNA strand. Your ship is constantly oscillating, and by dragging your finger across your tablet or phone screen, you navigate throughout a series of narrow passages. Along the way, you can gain powerups such as speed boosts, invincibility, and rotation freezes.
 
The rotation freeze will be your best friend because by Odin’s beard, the constant, non-stop spinning ship is the reason why this game is so difficult. The first 20 or so levels will have you thinking to yourself, “Pffff…..no biggie. This game is CAKE….and kinda boring.”
 
It gets harder.
 

 
As you navigate through each level, you are faced with increasingly narrower passages, opening and shutting doors, enemies that dart about, and a host of other things to make your life difficult. As you can imagine, piloting something that’s shaped like a sausage link that spins around through a narrow corridor is HARD. Toss in some slamming doors and enemies, and your reflexes will be put to the test.
 
Part of the difficulty lies in the fact that this is a touch surface game. Toss in a sweaty hand, and sometimes the controls don’t exactly go the way they should. All sweaty fingers aside however, this game controls quite well. Like I mentioned before, you drag your finger across the screen to pilot the ship. The speed at which you drag affects the speed of the ship. If you lift your finger off the screen, the ship stops moving…but continues spinning. Nothing you do can stop the spinning (unless you collect a freeze powerup).
 
Another aspect that adds to the difficulty is the fact that when you take damage, the ship lurches and stops. Imagine how frustrating this can get when you’re timing the spin of the ship just right in order to squeeze through a narrow passage, you miscalculate, take damage, and rather than take one hit, you take several and die because your ship lurches each time it hits something. It really makes you rethink your strategy a bit, and forces you to be patient and not make any sudden moves until the time is right.
 
As far as replayability goes, there’s plenty of it. Your task is to collect 100% of all the orbs in each level. Sure, you can grab 45% of them and call it a day and move on to the next level, but we all know that’s going to bug you until you get 100%…right? Cyklus is banking on the fact that people who play it are as OCD as I am when it comes to achieving 100% in all the levels. And while we’re on the subject of levels…there are 100 of them, with more to come in future updates.
 
If a hard game that’s going to make your blood boil with rage is your idea of a good time, then Cyklus is worth looking into. This is a 99 cent game that will give hours of “fun,” all on the go, no less. It’s simplistic, it’s beautiful, it will give you a stroke…and it’s a worthy entrant in the mobile games market. Cyklus is available via iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon.