I know I promised those of you who commented on the previous articles I’d cover your suggestions months ago, but man, time flies when you suddenly find yourself working for a budding Orwellian corporation and your only reprieve is, frankly, the kind of vice Akira was telling us about. Fortunately for you, I’ve made time to trade one dystopian method of control for another, and have returned with the knowledge of more cyberpunk mobile games for under $5 than you’ll know what to do with.

Puzzle Games

Deus Ex Go

Android: $0.99

iOS: $4.99

Let’s start with something you might be a little more familiar with. In the same vein as other mobile games based on Square Enix‘s flagship franchises, Deus Ex Go is a minimalist, movement-based puzzler in which you play as the reboot’s protagonist, Adam Jensen, in a mission prior to the events of Mankind Divided. Jensen, now working for Interpol but secretly allied with the Juggernaut Collective–an anti-Illuminati hacker organization–is tasked with the infiltration of a Warsaw mansion, home to one Sasha Novak. Novak, billionaire and (presumably) majority shareholder of Ironflank, a private security corporation, finds himself held captive by Purity First, an anti-augmentation terrorist group. As Jensen, the player must navigate said mansion (and later, similar-looking environments that we’re told aren’t the same location) through a series of single-answer puzzles to reach Novak, which is achieved through tile-based movement, static item pickups that grant Jensen usage of his augmentations, etc.

Fans of the Deus Ex series might notice a couple of red flags in the last paragraph. The gameplay flies directly in the face of the series’ most attractive attribute: choice. Through and through, the game is an exercise in linearity, forcing the player to come to a singular conclusion for every puzzle, each puzzle leading to the next, continuously searching for their princess in another castle. The gameplay itself felt, to this jaded gamer, repetitive and lazy. Oftentimes I would find myself repeating the same course of action that would result in the little Jensen avatar bursting into a million little geometric particles simply out of boredom. Of course, this wouldn’t be as much of an issue for me if other aspects of the game were more engaging–but unfortunately, they’re not. The art style, while consistent with the more recent games in the series (Breach in particular) introduces the player to environments that seem uninspired–partially populated by neo-Victorian furniture and other props, but mostly consisting of floating triangles, resulting in sets that feel particularly dull and empty. Similarly, the story dispenses a something resembling a conspiracy thriller in the vein of the series’ other games but fails to deliver anything interesting–largely due to the fact it’s all just a big fetch quest. The biggest upside, however, is that this game is an entirely optional part of an otherwise solid cyberpunk saga.

Deus Ex Go – 5/10

Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n

Android: $2.99

iOS: $2.99

Found phone games are becoming all the rage nowadays, and hype train conductor Telltale Games contributes to this by, appropriately, adapting Neon Dystopia-favorite Mr. Robot into one. Having found a phone at Coney Island, you (as yourself) are coaxed into helping a mysterious hacker, who is soon revealed to be f/Society’s second-most anarchistic member, Darlene. The game consists of long dialogues with various familiar characters, and phishing for sensitive information with those unfamiliar. Ultimately, you learn you are helping Darlene set up the fabled 5/9 hack, in which various corporations have their records digitally shredded, ideally resulting in the redistribution of international wealth.

You might be saying to yourself, “Wow, a game based on Mr. Robot sounds pretty great!” And it could have been. Unfortunately, however, the game’s format, coupled with its irrelevance to the show, makes for an oftentimes frustrating experience. Being a found phone game, 1.51exfiltrati0n.apk is essentially a glitzy text adventure, with the story being told almost exclusively through your conversations with its characters. However, the game does not use this to its advantage–dialogue with characters like Darlene are lengthy, almost to the point of being simply pedantic. Unlike other found phone games, 1.51 does not present the player with challenges or anything that I would define as a puzzle to solve. Unfortunately, as unrealistic as doing so from a simple phone may be, there is no hacking element. The closest it comes to a challenge is when you, in Darlene’s stead, must exploit corporate employees for sensitive material. However, there is no chance for failure; no matter what choices you make, no matter if you manage to smooth-talk your way into a Steel Mountain employee’s confidence or blackmail him with evidence of his affair, the result is always, ultimately, the same.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, while only a few hours in length, took me days to finish due to a misguided feature. Once my conversations with focus characters ended, I was unable to progress until a few hours later, in which the game sent me an alert in the form of a mock-up of a text message from said characters. While designed to make the game feel more immersive, this mechanic only resulted in my irritation as a character would “text” me at three in the morning, my phone rattling on my bedside table with a raspy vibration. But, of course, the only other option is to turn the notifications off, resulting in, well, an inability to tell when the game would allow me to play again. Of course, it shouldn’t surprise me that, after playing Deus Ex Go, minor games that tie into series toting anti-authoritarianism, but designed as advertisements by gaming giants, tend to ring hollow. Don’t bother with this one.

Mr. Robot: 1.51exfiltrati0n.apk – 4/10

Simulacra

Android: $4.99

iOS: $4.99

Instead, check out Kaigan Games‘ Simulacra, if you haven’t already. If you have, you might be wagging your finger at me, chiding me for inviting it to the cool kids’ technologically-advanced, dystopian table. But consider this: in this game’s scenario, you have found, yes, another phone–one of a young woman named Anna who has mysteriously disappeared, though her social media accounts remain active. In order to investigate, you must break into Anna’s hand computer and gather clues strewn about in her accounts. As a result, you discover (there be spoilers ahead) that Anna has been possessed by a techno-demon that spawned out of the primordial ooze that is the internet’s vainest Twitter and Tinder profiles and refers to itself by a very Baudrillardian term: the Simulacra. Sounds pretty cyberpunk to me–at least more than Kaigan’s first found phone game, S.I.M. That one just has cultists.

Still, Simulacra and its predecessor both are examples of experimentation in this emerging style of a game gone right. In particular, Simulacra manages to set the tone incredibly well with its storytelling, substituting jump scares with a creeping sense of dread. Following the typical horror formula, the plot begins innocently-but-terrifyingly enough with the disappearance of a young woman. As the player digs deeper, however, ambient hallucinatory sound effects imitating everyday noises (such as someone sighing or a door closing), interactions with one of Anna’s friends who may or may not be in internet hell, and an unsettling moment when a post carrying a cryptic message is made on one of Anna’s social media accounts of its own accord turned my stomach. While not revolutionary, the gameplay’s mechanics are serviceable to the story, which on its own stands quite well.

Simulacra – 7/10

RPGs

Shadowrun: Dragonfall

The follow-up to Harebrained Schemes‘ successful reboot of the Shadowrun series, Dragonfall is a new campaign that takes place in 2054 Berlin. You, as a shadowrunner, begin the story with a heist on an antiquated manse. Leading you is Monika Schafer, an old friend that has deep roots in the anarchist society Flux State. Neither of you sees the set-up waiting for you, however–Monika gets fried by biofeedback while trying to hack a door, and the rest of your team faces an ambush shortly after. Once you escape, you vow to discover the who and why behind Monika’s murder, uncovering a conspiracy surrounding a dragon that awakened in 2012 and laid waste to Berlin in the process. What follows is a more palatable alternative of the “turn over the seedy criminal underworld of neon-lit Germany” plotline that’s gotten kinda popular lately, complete with all of the cyberpunk and fantasy tropes you love.

I’ll admit, my return to the world of Shadowrun was tentative at best. While I enjoyed Shadowrun Returns well enough, I felt that the gameplay style and writing put forth by Harebrained Schemes in the initial entry was particularly linear, never encouraging the player to explore the world around them. Dragonfall, however, delivers in both categories this time around, taking cues from RPG classics like Mass Effect and Deus Ex. Interactions with other characters have dialogue trees reminiscent of a Bioware game–not too simple but not too complex–and companions in your quest congregate in a single area, unfurling their backstories as the game continues at the player’s discretion. The levels, as well, provide the player with genuine puzzles and sidequests–not situations that require a certain skill at a certain level to bypass in moments that always seem to be particularly inconvenient–thus making the world much more interesting to explore. Finally, the writing has handily improved; the narrative is full-on cyberpunk with neo-noir stylings, developing themes revolving around the nature of control. The only problems I had were with the game’s loading times, and once or twice it crashed on me, but these problems are more indicative of my own device’s processing power more than anything else. Originally, when I began writing this article, I was going to tell you that you should definitely drop the $3.00 it cost, but it actually looks like it’s dropped off the radar since Harebrained Schemes got bought out, so maybe just download the apk elsewhere instead.

Shadowrun: Dragonfall – 9/10

Cyber Knights

Android: $2.99

Download free version here

Congratulations! After being operated extensively by a shady cyber clinic in the tunnels beneath New Boston, you, a former runner, have just upgraded your career to that of a Cyber Knight, a mercenary-for-hire fighting in a cold war fought between the megacorporations that own what’s left of the world some 200 years down the line. Don’t worry, that pain running along what used to be your skeletal frame will subside eventually–for now, you’ve got to hack, shoot, and beat your way through whatever stands in your way at the behest of the megacorps, street gangs, and whoever’s got enough cash for you to upgrade and make it through another day.

Of course, if this sounds like something of a bootleg of the Shadowrun tabletop RPG, you’re definitely not wrong. Cyber Knights, a Trese Brothers release, takes more than one page out of the previously-covered series’ worn pages. It’s so much of a ripoff that it goes so far as to lift terminology (e.g. runner, cram, chummer) and even a bunch of the damn rules outright. All it’s missing are the fantasy tropes, leaving you with a bit of a stripped-down version that could almost be considered reminiscent of the SNES video game adaptation if it was turn- and tile-based. I can respect this–bootlegging something, while oftentimes pretty tacky in my opinion, can result in some interesting original ideas. Not to mention that this game is built from the ground up, which really adds to its real-life punk cred.

However, this is not to say it’s a good game. The art assets are fairly hideous–I do recognize that some things are specifically designed to be ugly, but the character sprites, level design, and user interface are all just bad. The writing doesn’t really help anything, either–the dialogue and universe are poorly-constructed, leaving the player with little more than genre cliches. And I personally did not care for the gameplay, which centers around your run-of-the-mill turn-based mechanics. I will admit that strategic RPGs like these are not my speed, but I found myself so bogged down by an overabundance of rules, which, coupled with the game’s confusing interface and unclear objectives, contributed to an experience that failed to provide any sort of entertainment within fifteen minutes of starting. However, if you are the type of player that does enjoy highly-structured gameplay, this seems to be the game’s only redeeming quality. You’ve been warned.

Cyber Knights – 4/10

Cyberlords: Arcology

Android: $1.99

Download free version here

Shortly after arriving in the Asgard Arcology, mercenary-for-hire Jesse Lord finds himself ambushed and subsequently imprisoned in a cyber clinic owned by the diabolical McCoy corporation, where he is informed by an AI known as Omega that he will be dissected and dismantled for parts if he does not escape. Lord soon after finds himself in cahoots with a resistance group known as Thor (yikes, that’s pretty on the nose). After rounding up a team of freedom fighters, Jesse leads the charge against the dastardly McCoys in order to liberate Asgard and return the power to the vox populi.

In the same vein as Cyber Knights, HandyGames‘ Cyberlords comes off as a better-produced example than its counterpart. Also clearly inspired by cyberpunk tabletop games like Cyberpunk 2020 and Shadowrun, Cyberlords follows real-time-with-pause RPG tropes, allowing for a more streamlined experience. The art style, animations, and UI are fairly standard for a mobile game (particularly a free one)–not stunning, but not horrible. And the soundtrack doesn’t have just one song, but three! Unfortunately, the writing has a similar quality to that of Cyber Knights, and its gameplay has a problem opposite to its counterpart’s. Instead of being too convoluted, Cyberlords’ gameplay isn’t challenging, rendering customization and strategy essentially useless. Still, it manages to bring the CRPG to an idle format, even if it didn’t do so in a particularly compelling manner for me. If you need to kill some time in transit or in one of the many, many lines you’ll spend a significant amount of time in, this might be noncommittal enough to try. Just make sure to buy the $2.00 version if you don’t want an ad bar obscuring part of the screen or the game prompting you every five minutes for a review.

Cyberlords: Arcology – 6/10

Action Games

Vector 1 & 2

Android: $0.99 (1) $1.99 (2)

iOS: $0.99 (1) $1.99 (2)

Download 1 free version on Android and iOS

Download 2 free version on Android and iOS

After clocking in at your garden-variety dystopian cubicle farm, a visually indistinguishable office drone (let’s call him Steve) decides he’s had enough! Tearing off his mind control headband and stifling work clothes, Steve needs to show the world that he’s an individual! He needs to be free! After unbinding himself from the system’s shackles, Steve quickly learns that he has had parkour superpowers this entire time! Now, he must flee from Big Brother’s secret police by freerunning across an astoundingly familiar-looking city. Unsurprisingly, Vector 2 follows essentially the same so-called plotline, just with a shinier, genre-savvier coat of paint slapped on top of it. Turns out the plot of Vector 1 takes place in a Matrix!

Russian developer Nekki‘s Vector is more or less a clone of the Mirror’s Edge runner adaptation that was released for iPhone in 2010 and is no longer available because EA must really hate making money. The visual style, coupled with the fact that you play as a character acrobatically leaping across rooftops, really kinda makes the inspiration unambiguous and feels a touch uninspired. Furthermore, the game comes off as a bit cash-grabby; the game requires you to “learn” moves (i.e.: buy with in-game currency) in order to progress, and considering that 30-second commercials are sprinkled in here and there, sometimes mandatorily, it feels a bit like a pay-to-win game. (I know, those in glass houses and all that, but come off it already.) However, progression does become more natural as you progress, despite the game’s many efforts to get you to buy things that have no bearing outside of the in-game universe. 2 doubles down on this by introducing loot boxes and other convoluted RPG-like elements that overcomplicate the whole “run until you don’t run anymore” premise.

Both Vector games aren’t without merit, though. It’s clear some care has been put into the creation of these games when they act like games. While the settings (the city of not-Glass in 1, your typical future-city in 2) and art style (seemingly-rotoscoped silhouettes across a dynamically-lit, sleek, scrolling background) aren’t wholly original, they are detailed. The gameplay is much more engaging than of, say, other mobile runners like Retroshifter, which we’ve covered before. So ultimately, whether you get the free version or the “full” version of either game, you really get what you pay for in this case.

Vector – 5/10

Vector 2 – 6/10

CyberSphere

Download for free on Android and iOS

So this is a game where you play as a robot shooting other robots. There’s seemingly no attempt at a story of any kind–you just go in and shoot machines that are apparently evil because they have red lights on them.

And you know what? That’s okay. Sometimes you just need to be able to virtually blow stuff up for no disclosed reason. Kinsunja, CyberSphere’s developer, presents the player with a decent wave-based shooter (which you can switch between third-person or top-down perspectives) that has pretty standard graphics, a variety of options for customization, and enough levels to keep you occupied for a couple days’ free time at the least. There’s even a multiplayer option, for those of you who happen to have social lives. Of course, the snob in me says it’s not really cyberpunk–it’s too generic sci-fi shooter to be so–and the biggest downside in the gameplay I found was the touchscreen controls were occasionally fairly janky–if I let my thumbs stray outside the virtual joystick’s radius, I’d lose control of the character, which could be fairly frustrating in the heat of battle. But otherwise, it’s solid freeware.

CyberSphere – 4/10

That’s all I’ve got for mobile. Tune in next time for the final installment, wherein I turn over itch.io‘s seedy underbelly to bring you the most notable cyberpunk games that are free for download. Until then, if you’re new to this series, check out the first six parts:

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6