Reviews from

in the past


Made me rediscover how enticing simple rhythm games can be.
Also on phone it plays wonders.
Also the story is great.
Also the music choice is one of the best out there.

The game feels very limited by its own design, and the charts show that. The charting in general feels very samey and sloppy, if you've played a chart in Cytus 1 you've played them all, with no progression between chapters. Very often, a chart would have a very sudden difficulty spike for no real reason, or have very long intervals with literally 0 notes.
The fixed scrollspeed hurts a lot of charts very much, rendering some of them barely playable. In general, the game lacks a lot of settings, or any at all really.
The game also feels like it's missing a bunch of difficulty levels, there are a lot of charts just cramped into level 9. An entire new difficulty (like easy and hard) would be very welcome too, which is something I think is addressed in Cytus 2.
There are also some special story songs (the Alive songs), songs that are incredibly long (easily hitting the 5 or 6 minute mark on multiple occasions), but because you have to wait mid song for the story text to scroll, or look at a CG for a few seconds, then continue the song. The story itself is not that deep either, I don't understand why they chose the worst possible way to present it. Plus if you wanted to grind these songs it just adds unnecessary friction. I don't mind the length of the song, I just don't like the long waits.
Songlist is very hit or miss, mostly obscured by the poor, repetive charting. Even if the song is good, the charting often focuses on repeating one single pattern over and over.
I'm also not a fan of the whole pixel hunting mechanic for accessing the hidden songs, it's not properly conveyed and many of the inputs you have to perform are impossible to guess.