Cyborg Justice is one of those forgotten travesties of the Sega Genesis. It sported a surprisingly deep combat system for a scrolling beat-em-up; but mediocre levels reeking of carelessness. For example, Level 1-1 remains one of the worst in gaming history.
The main selling point of Cyborg Justice was the ability to build your own cyborg. This amounted to picking a left arm and a pair of legs, each with a unique move or advantage. During the fighting, you could rip off an opponent's arm and beat them with it- or replace your arm with theirs. Successfully dismantling an enemy piece by piece eventually allowed you to switch out the legs if you so chose. It is a difficult process, as it requires precise timing and the cooperation of a thing actively trying to kill you.
Yes, that does sound cool, but then you begin playing Level 1-1.
The problem with 1-1 is this big hole in the middle of it.
This thing is impassible. Unless you happen to have a certain pair of legs: the pneumatic legs. For my cousin and I, pneumatic was not in our 5th grade vocabulary. We didn't know that those legs held a sort of piston operated by compressed gas. Even if we did, I doubt we would have known such legs offered the benefit of a double-jump, for the advantage of a gas piston in mid-air is dubious. As we possessed other forms of legs, we could only leap mournfully to our deaths like sentient robot lemmings.
A two-player team will still face death at this hole even if they have the correct legs. Notice the hole is so big that only one side of the screen can contain land. Unless you and your partner jump at the exact same instant, the leading player will be blocked by the camera which will not travel faster than the slower player. The edge of the screen, too slow in advancing, will be an invisible wall that sends you to the abyss. But these examples of endless player-death are not the real reason this chasm makes Level 1-1 the worst in gaming.
The issue is that it destroys the soul of the game. Cyborg Justice allows you to make any sort of cyborg you wish, but then in the first three minutes of game-play, places an obstacle that can only be overcome by a single body part. You MUST pick pneumatic legs. If you do not, 1-1 is basically the last level; you can go no further. In this one, deft move, the designers managed to invalidate their game's coolest feature.The philosophy- the great idea behind the game dies right there, right at the beginning. And without that spirit to captivate the player, Cyborg Justice doomed itself to being ignored and forgotten.