The Cycle: Frontier was almost good

When The Cycle: Frontier was released into early access, I was filled with excitement. As an avid Escape from Tarkov player, I was eager to find another extraction shooter to immerse myself in. However, despite my initial enthusiasm, I soon discovered that The Cycle lacked some crucial elements that would have made it a truly enjoyable experience. Even in its early stages, I realized that this game was not the right fit for me. The Cycle fell short due to the absence of key elements that were necessary for it to be a quality game which I could continue to go back to. As The Cycle: Frontier was the first casualty in the wave of Extraction Shooters to be released and fail, I feel like I am beating a dead horse writing a post like this, but I never got to hit the horse the first time, so I am taking my shot.

One of the largest issues I had with The Cycle was that there was no headshot mechanic, or at least one that truly leveled the playing field when there was a notable gear difference. I’ve talked about one of the things I love most about Tarkov: that a well-placed headshot can one-tap almost any enemy, and as a result, there is an additional element of skill. The Cycle struggled with this; it always felt that any time I went against another player, whoever had the superior gear would win the engagement. There was no element of skill to turn the fight; it was simply predetermined based on who brought the better armor. The rush of killing someone who clearly had better armor because you got the jump and landed the headshot was second to none. The Cycle simply did not have that.

Another element of The Cycle that I felt missed the mark was the monsters. They felt somewhat less substantial. Not long after starting to play, I ran by most of the monsters on my way to the location I was going. Outside of the challenging monsters, most of them felt like you could simply run away and skip them. The monsters didn’t add to the tension of the game; they became an obstacle to avoid to progress in the game. Engaging with them was rarely rewarding and often got in the way of accomplishing your goal. On top of all of this, they were simply too cartoonish. The entire aesthetic of the game was cartoonish, but only the monsters bothered me. This may have been a combination of their appearance, alongside the fact that they were mostly a non-factor in most cases.

The Cycle wasn’t all bad. I can’t say it was almost good, then proceed to criticize it throughout the entire post. The Cycle’s best feature, by far, was that the time between raids was short, really short. The time to re-equip gear and then get back into a raid was perfect. This tempered some of the risk of the game and ensured that we were engaging with the most fun part of the game, the raids themselves. Other Extraction Shooters have struggled with this; the time to get back into a raid is sometimes longer than the raids themselves. There have been nights when I spent more time in my hideout than in a raid in Tarkov.

There were many other things about the game that were well done. Despite the armor system, the gunplay was fun. The looting, movement, and most of the gameplay were enjoyable. Despite many of my gripes, the foundation was solid, and many adjustments to fix the game could have been made. Even if the NPCs were still less than ideal, if I felt like the PvP was more skill-based, I would have been happy with the game. Of course, regardless of all of this, the good or the bad, The Cycle: Frontier had one major issue.

Extraction shooter games, due to the immense risk involved in each raid, may be one of the few genres that cannot successfully adopt a free-to-play model. There is a large amount of pressure to take every advantage one can to survive. This makes it very easy for those with loose morals to justify cheating. This is only compounded by The Cycle: Frontier’s free-to-play model, which eliminates any consequences for cheaters. If caught, they would lose an account they had paid nothing for, only to create another one and resume cheating. No matter how good an anti-cheat mechanism is, it’s rendered nearly useless if players can simply create a new account.

In contrast, Escape from Tarkov has an upfront cost. While it does have its fair share of cheaters, having an upfront cost to the game is a good starting point to deter cheaters. While it does not solve cheating by itself, it does make the fight much harder for cheaters since they must invest to create a new account. Tarkov still has a cheater problem. I am by no means trying to imply that it has solved the cheater problem, but the contrast between Tarkov and The Cycle is stark. The Cycle serves as a cautionary tale as the extraction shooter genre gains popularity. Even a small upfront cost may discourage a significant number of cheaters, as each time they get caught, they have to reinvest in the game.