Cyberia

Genre: Action-adventure

Release Year: 1996

Developer: Xatrix Entertainment

Publisher: Interplay

Age Rating: 12+

Playability Status: Perfect

Tested On: Windows 8 x64

Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

While many of us are still feeling the pinch of the global financial crisis, that’s nothing compared to what’s going to happen in 2022, at least according to the plot of Cyberia. In this imagined future, the entire global economy will collapse. This chaos leaves just two factions controlling the entire planet, the First World Alliance in the west and the Cartel in the east. Five years after this dramatic economic crash, the leader of the FWA learns of a plot to develop a super weapon in a complex in Siberia. Hiring a convicted cyber hacker called Zak, he sends the reluctant hero off to infiltrate the complex. In 1996, Cyberia’s pre-rendered game environments were impressive and this went some way to compensating for the often simplistic action and puzzle elements and overly linear adventure. 18 years later the game has lost a lot of its sheen, its once impressive visuals now looking positively primitive, though there is still an entertaining little action adventure game to be (re)discovered here.

Installation

Cyberia is a DOS game, which means you will need DOSBox in order to run it on a modern machine. Use the generic DOSBox configuration as per our tutorial here.

Once you have DOSBox configured, insert the Cyberia CD-ROM into your computers optical drive. Start DOSBox and execute the following commands. (We’ll assume you mounted your DVD drive as drive D: in DOSBox).

D:
install

The games installation utility will then start. Leave the destination folder as the default and press Enter. Installation should complete within a few seconds and then return you to the DOS prompt.

Starting the game

To play the game at any time, make sure the Cyberia CD-ROM is in the drive, start DOSBox and then enter the following commands.

c:
CD Cyberia
Cyberia

After entering your name, you will need to watch the introduction movie. Enjoy the quality acting and then your craft will dock, Zak will disembark and your adventure will begin.

Configuring controllers

Cyberia supports joystick controllers, but like many DOS games the support is somewhat lacking. With the default DOSBox joystick mappings, you should be able to manipulate and fire the guns in the action sequences, but moving Zak around the environments is only possible with the keyboard. Remember if you need to remap joystick controls in DOSBox, press and hold the Control key and then press F1.

If you want to control the entire game from your Xbox 360 pad, we strongly recommend that you use XPadder. Below is a picture of our Xpadder profile for the game.

With Xpadder configured like this, you can use the D-Pad to walk around the environments. Pressing the A button will fire your weapon or perform an action. The other buttons activate various scanners. These scanners are needed at certain points while exploring the environments. Press X to activate a infrared/thermal scan, Y to activate magnetic resonance imaging and B to use a bio-scan. Pressing the back button will exit from scanning mode. Finally, pressing Escape will pause the game and bring up the options menu.

With no patches to install or visual options to tweak, you’re now all set to start your adventure and uncover the mysteries of the Cyberia complex. Good luck and good hunting.