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In its current incarnation, CyberStrike 2 has a few glitches and oversights that some gamers - me included - will find disturbing. While CyberStrike 2 isn't as complex as, say, MechWarrior 2, there is still a slew of controls to master - and amazingly (some would say criminally) there's no option to reconfigure joystick button assignments. That's probably 989 Studios' fault, since NFL GameDay 99 suffered from the same flaw, but regardless of who's to blame, I find it almost incomprehensible that a game released at the end of 1998 doesn't provide the option to customize joystick buttons - or even keyboard commands, for crying out loud! The topper is that the game assigns commands to only four joystick buttons - talk about finding the lowest common denominator!
Issuing commands to friendly units in single-player games can be a logistical nightmare, but that wasn't much of a sticking point with me since I didn't give a hoot for the single-player missions anyway. More troubling is the inability to set up dead zones for joysticks and rudders; whenever I throw my SideWinder 3D Pro stick to the left, I invariably twist a little by mistake and see my turret rotating when I don't want it to.
Another strange design decision is the inability to fire two or more weapons at a time, even if one's an energy gun and the other a projectile like a tracking rocket that has its own mount. And to make things really confusing, you have to deselect one weapon type before you can use another one: To switch from rockets to grenades, for instance, you have to hit the number for rockets and then hit the number for grenades, rather than just having the grenades command take priority and automatically disable rockets. (Using the function keys automatically switches weapons and components, but only a handful of them are supported.)
I learned to deal with all these quirks, and you probably will too; of more importance are the issues of lag and opponents. The bulk of the games I played online were relatively lag-free, but judging from the in-game chat I saw, lag is either fairly common or there's a lot of whiners blaming lag for their defeats. And nearly two months after going live, you can't say crowds of folks are beating down the doors to get into CyberStrike: the most players I saw online was just under 100, and most of them were using the free shareware version that doesn't give you all the game's really cool features.
Luckily for Simutronics and 989, nearly all the control issues can be addressed in a new version - that's part of the beauty of online games. As far as lag goes, the blame probably lies more with gamers' Internet service providers rather than Simutronics, and when word gets out about how much fun CyberStrike 2 can be, then there should be a nice healthy community of friends and foes there.
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