Cyber Knights: Flashpoint is a heist-themed, turn-based RPG. It’s also an entire Player’s Handbook of RPG rules wrapped in a charming cyberpunk indie game.
There’s stealth, base-management, combat, hacking, heists, and black market dealing. There’s a bit of everything going on at all times. And that makes getting started a bit of a hurdle. This BigFriendly.Guide will help you out with tips and tricks for your first few hours with Cyber Knights: Flashpoint.
Do the tutorial
You’re given a flood of information right at the beginning of the game. You’re introduced to the world and countless mechanics within the first couple minutes. Don’t skip the tutorial. Let it introduce you to everything you need to know. And, when you invariably forget something, the dev’s wiki will have a lot of answers for you.
Take your time in the tutorials and get your feet under you before you go tackling any big, important missions.
There’s an undo … kinda
Things can go sideways during a mission fast and it can be hard (if not impossible) to salvage. Luckily, you can redo a turn or the entire level — or, if your errors were more fundamental, go back to before the mission started.
It’s just not obvious how to do that. In the menu (hit Escape), choose Load Game. At the top of your list of saves and autosaves will be three options: Retry Turn, Restart Level, and Restore Before Mission.
These are basically a quickload option for pertinent autosaves. Use them. Use them liberally. You’re going to guess a guard’s route wrong, click in the slightly wrong place, or maybe just end a turn when you meant to confirm movement. It’s okay to replay a section as much as you need to.
Look around before starting
Once you’ve planned a heist and dropped into the level, take some time before your first move. Look around. Make sure you’re aware of all of your objectives. Find the loot you want to collect.
Planning a route will save you a ton of headache (and reloading). It’ll also give you a minute to find lockboxes and hackable matrix hosts — things that aren’t highlighted automatically, but are vitally important to your success.
Stealth first, shoot second
Think of Cyber Knights: Flashpoint as a stealthy heist game first and a shooty combat game second. Both ways of playing are valid, but staying out of sight and keeping enemies in the dark will make missions a whole lot easier.
During your missions, you’ll run into lots and lots of security — cameras, pressure plates, laser grids, and just regular old human guards — that you’ll need to either navigate around or turn off. Enemies also pay attention to the sounds you make if you move too fast.
Getting spotted increases the security level of the mission, and bad things — like reinforcements — tend to happen as that bar ticks up. If you just gun your way through the level, you’re going to rack up more security than you can handle (although, if you’re fast, you can get away with this kind of strategy on occasion).
Knowing when and when not to pull the trigger is something you’ll develop over time, but start training that muscle as soon as you get out of the tutorial.
You can do actions in any order
If you’re familiar with other tactics games like XCOM, you may be used to only being able to fire once per turn and attacks automatically ending your turn. Cyber Knights works very differently.
Instead of certain actions ending your turn, you can attack, use skills, and move in any order — as long as you have the Action Points (AP). You can even see how many AP a move will use with little pips along your route.
Everything you do — moving, shooting a gun, healing — takes these points. An assault rifle might take two AP to shoot, but three AP to reload. A pistol may only take one AP to shoot. Sneaking takes more AP than sprinting to cover the same distance.
And that means Cyber Knights has a more complicated action economy than you might expect. You can mix and match actions across your turn in any order you want. In fact, you can even mix your actions with teammates if you…
Delay your turn before you end it
In Cyber Knights, everyone in a level — from your team to the enemies you’re facing — rolls initiative at the start of every turn. At any point, each of your characters can Yield or Delay their actions. Yielding moves them after the next ally in the initiative order. Delaying drops them by 10.
Importantly, Yielding and Delaying doesn’t affect your AP. If you find yourself with some extra AP left over after you’re done what you needed to this round, Yield or Delay before you end your turn. You might get an angle on a new enemy or you might be able to help out an ally a little further along in the initiative order.
Use Cyber Knight’s comprehensive developer wiki to your advantage
There’s a ton of character customization in Cyber Knights, and that can lead to some really unique characters. However, that many customization options can also create a little bit of a problem in the complexity department. The game is daunting, especially in the first few hours.
Thankfully, there are great tooltips on your abilities and menu items that will help refresh your memory when all getting to be a bit … much. But there’s also a developer wiki which is both snappy and super informative. And it’s made by the people who made the game, so you’re not running the risk of an errant wiki editor ruining your time.
We think our tips are pretty good, but we can’t teach you everything in this game.