Cyberball 2072 is football game where you exchange humans for robots and the football for an actual bomb. As the norm, the main goal of this game is to score a touchdown. The catch in this game is that every play brings the bomb closer to going off, unless you cross the 50-yard line or score a touchdown. Your team can get destroyed by either the bomb going off or even from general gameplay. You must make repairs at half time or replace the player with upgraded robots in the game.

This game originally came out in 1989, and if you compare it to football games that were released in the same time period, you can tell that it had a few features that were ahead of its time. You can see on-field view when you are calling your plays, situational challenges, and other things that are still in modern football games.

There are three modes of play in this game. First in the “rookie league” in which the game just gives you a team and lets you play a game. Next up is the Regulation Cyberball, where you get to choose your opposing coach, the team you want to play with. This is important because the coaches have various win-loss records, and the teams to choose from are stronger in certain areas, such as passing, running, or balanced. Game Breakers mode is where you are given a few plays to try to score a touchdown.

The AI in this game is not that difficult to beat, in fact it gets even easier if you are playing with a friend. This is especially true if you have played in Madden game. All you have to do is recognize the patterns in the AI and you will soon find the way to get around them and beat the computer every time.

The graphics for this game are decent, but honestly I have better looking games on my NES from the same time period. The animations for the robots are really good for a game that was released approximately 18 years ago. What I find really annoying is the audio for the game. It is extremely repetitive and even more annoying. If you have this game you will soon been looking for the mute button on your TV.

Since I never played the original game I did a little reading up on it, and after reading it I was baffled since the original game had multiplayer. The arcade cabinet had two screens and four controllers, allow up to four people to play against each other (two on one side, two on the other). So I was pretty excited to see what kinds of multiplayer action that I would get to play in with my friends or even online and, to my horror, there was none. The only form of online gaming is that two players can be on the same team against a computer AI, even using Xbox Live! This is a complete and unforgivable omission to this game. Half of the fun of playing football games is playing against another human and not the computer.

Gameplay: 4.5
You can find some fun in this game for a short time, but pretty soon you will find it repetitive and boring.

Graphics: 3.9
The various animations are nice, but other games from this area look a lot better.

Sound: 4.1
Annoying, that is the only word that comes to mind when you think about the audio for this game.

Difficulty: Easy
Since you can only play against the AI, this game is really easy - especially once you know how to play the game.

Concept: 6.2
The concept of this game is pretty cool, robots playing football with a bomb.

Multiplayer: 2.0
Who wants to only play this game in co-op mode? Even if you go online, you can only play with another person and not directly against them.

Overall: 4.5
This game is not worth your money or even the time it takes to download it. Not having the ability to play against another human is a huge strike to this game. Bottom line is to avoid this game.