Test your problem solving skills, patience, and memory | First Impressions - Cyber Protocol

Cyber Protocol is an cyberpunk arcade puzzle game with a high degree of difficulty and hardcore elements. It is currently available for iOS, PC, Xbox, and Switch, but this article will be focusing on the recently released iOS version.

The main goal of Cyber Protocol is to reach the ends of the level by any means necessary, however there is an added layer of challenge for those completionists and hardcore gamers who are looking for more. The levels are all timed, all the collected white dots — similar to Pac-Man — are counted as scores, and the amount of deaths players make are counted too, all resulting in a high score at the end of the levels.

Even if you ignore these optional challenges, it's still a hard game. Cyber Protocol presents players with many different obstacles within the levels that will require creative and logical thinking, as well as fast fingers to do some frantic maneuvering. Laser beams, roaming hazards, “fire” walls, exploding tiles (like bomberman), and many more hazards are put in-between the player and the exit point.

Player cannot just rely on pure skill and reaction time, as most of the puzzles require keen observation and planning in order to pass through. Sometimes players can get lucky by frantically sliding random directions, but that almost never works for the entirety of the levels, as as soon as you die without a checkpoint, you reset from way to the start of the level anyway.

For the hardcore completionists, it means studying, replaying, and practicing every single level (all 100 of them) for a long, long time, before doing an “official” run to achieve a top score. And if that wasn’t enough, there is a separate mode called Arcade where the pace is increased, lives are limited, and there is a top 20 global leaderboard to conquer.

Presentation wise, the 2D graphics, neon-lit art style, CRT retro filter, and 8 bit techno soundtrack are nice enough and fits the cyberpunk-hacking theme it is going for. It just needs one-hand to play, but only plays at landscape orientation.

So far I find it fun and challenging, however the difficulty is not something that I think everyone would like. In the first few levels, Cyber Protocol is already hard enough, what more for the latter parts of it? At a cheap price of $4.99, it doesn’t hurt much to try though.