Cyber Citizen Shockman (Switch)

Powah Dunk | May 30, 2023 | Review | No Comments

Cyber Citizen Shockman is a title that originally released on the Turbografx 16 back in 1989 and spawned a successful franchise that sadly didn’t reach our shores. Now in the year 2023 It’s time to get our Kaizō Chōjin Shubibinman on thanks to Ratalaika Games and their re-release!

Kaizō Chōjin Shubibinman or Cyber Citizen Shockman developed by Masaya Games is a homage to “Henshin ” style media, for example Kamien Rider or Capcom’s long forgotten Viewtiful Joe.

This title puts you in control of either a male or female student (or both if you play 2 player co-op) as Doc transforms you into the titular character/s to fight the evil Dark Skull forces who occupy your town.

You have 18 days to rid your town of Dark Skull and it’s up to you to choose what route through the town you take to get to his lair and evict this Darth Vader wannabe from your town.

There isn’t much of a narrative beyond this and the initially confusing day system and menu to trawl through doesn’t leave the greatest of first impressions, don’t worry the game does improve from this but only slightly.

Cyber Citizen Shockman is a 2D platformer with a little resemblance to the original Mega Man games, only if he was melee focused, had 3 level themes and the same amount of bosses only with different attacks and colour swaps.

You’ll unlock different attacks such as a ranged gun that needs to charge when you save a citizen from an area on the map, this is done by simply beating the stage, you’ll either get an upgrade or some gold or in the rare instance somewhere to heal up for free as your saviour Doc likes to charge you a thousand yen just to heal and money isn’t exactly pouring like water and used for upgrades.

The game controls like an ice stage, all of the time, slippery controls and one of the most wildly inconsistent jumps make what could have been a really fun game, an exercise in annoyance and don’t even start me on the Dragon with the overly large hit box!

If you do want an easier time to get through Cyber Citizen Shockman there are cheats and enhancements as expected of every Ratalaika Games re-release and the usual plethora of visual tweaks and the ever so handy rewind feature which can help you negate those stupid off screen rockets.

I didn’t absolutely hate Cyber Citizen Shockman but I do think that originally the idea to skip this title and localise the much better sequel was the right move. It’s a curiosity title that hopefully spurs the re-release of more of the titles in the franchise as there is alot of retro fun to have there, sadly not much of it can be found here.