The Legend of Cyber Cowboy – PS5 Review

The Legend of Cyber Cowboy from Eastasiasoft is a Westworld-style twin stick shooter with a similar feel to The Binding Of Isaac in terms of the randomly generated aspect and the going from room to room part. Only unlike Edward McMillen’s effort, there no map. Unlike Isaac, the enemies you face are all cybernetically enhanced Wild West tropes rather than eldritch horrors depicting your neuroses. For example, in the first level, you’ll face simple shooters, machine gun wielding enemies and flamethrower equipped baddies.

The first two are ranged enemies that you’ll have to see off with caution, though they tend to hold their fire if they’re a fair distance away. The flamethrower guys pack a real punch so you have to get rid before they close in on you, lest you take tons of damage. Somewhat annoyingly, you’ll not be able to see them on a larger room as the forced landscape perspective, while useful with smaller rectangular rooms, isn’t too handy when it comes to portrait aspect rooms.

In each level, you’ll find a room with replacement ammunition and a health top-up. Additionally, there’s a room where you can buy a powerful weapon that is also subject to RNG and, certainly in our case, your main tool for beating the boss of each level.

Your default pistol has unlimited ammunition, sadly any weapons you buy have a finite ammunition supply. Our preferred sniper rifle for example, only has fifty-one rounds. This is fine except for when your weapon runs out of ammunition. It then disappears and you can’t replenish the ammo.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, especially when the bleak RNG sees fit to only spawn a handful of enemies in a level, with not enough credits dropping for you to buy another weapon. So you go to the boss level, die and then restart the level, with the hope the randomness is a little kinder.

The most annoying thing we found, wasn’t the fact that you restart a respective level from the beginning upon dying, more the fact that you can’t save your progress. There’s not even a password system like the days of yore before battery backups were normal. This is a bitter pill to swallow, as to get the platinum trophy that many have grown accustomed to with games from this publisher, you have to beat all five bosses in one run, as opposed to being able to break it up into manageable chunks.

We found ourselves reaching the second level, clearing all the enemies out, attempting the boss and finding ourselves not able to buy a weapon and subsequently do enough damage to kill the boss. You see, while the bosses get harder, your energy bar remains meagre from start to finish. Your only chance is to get lucky with the weapons granted to you.

In conclusion, we came away feeling generally unenthused by The Legend of Cyber Cowboy. It’s a fair game, but a few quality-of-life improvements like saving your progress wouldn’t go amiss. As it goes, you’re reliant on putting your PS5 into rest mode and hoping you don’t cop an update.