Cybermorph sets the tone for the rest of the system.

User Rating: 4.5 | Cybermorph JAG
Imagine this: You've just paid £250 for the brand new Atari Jaguar. Its 64-bit, a good four times the power of the SNES and Megadrive, and what do you know, the good people at Atari have bundled in a game to get you started. Shame then that the game is absolute junk, and will set the tone for the rest of your time with the console.

From the outset, Cybermorph is a dreadful game. The controls are extremely wonky, due in no small part to the Jaguar's controller. You go up and down with the face buttons and accelerate with the A button. Movement with the Jaguar's stiff D-Pad is a chore, and when you have to make delicate reversals and turnarounds, the game is even more of a pain to play. The game has a very limited set of objectives, and you'll soon be repeating the same tasks over and over again, which consist of mainly shooting a few random enemies, or collecting yellow crystals. Not my idea of a good time.

The visuals in Cybermorph are the definition of abhorrent. As you fly around the various worlds which look like patchwork quilts of blue for the various bodies of water and darker colours for ground. The few landmarks that pop up sporadically are literally grey rectangles with a few yellow squares on them to act as windows. Nothing has any texture on it, and while this was fine for 16-bit titles such as Starfox, on a much more powerful system, you expect much better. The only real graphical upgrade the game offers over Super FX chip games is that your ship morphs into various forms when moving around, but so what?

Silence is mostly what you'll be treated to while playing Cybermorph. The few morsels of sound you might hear are the crude blowing up effects and this weird robotic female voice who updates you on your mission status.

Closing comments: Cybermorph is THE game which highlights the Jaguar's superficiality. With all the talk of high end gaming that the Jaguar would bring, playing Cybermorph shows just how much crap Atari were spewing with the Jaguar, and for all intents and purposes, Cybermorph is a terrible start for a console that had a wretched lifespan.