I, on the contrary, love the "future space" vibe, everything sci-fi etc. Used to have a lot of fun on Planetside 2.
Still, the "setting" is not the selling point of this game. It's fine tho, i believe they did the right choice going for something COMPLETELY different than Tarkov, the current leader in the genre. It'll feel way less "copy/pasta" that way.
I've played like 4 raids, survive 50%. So far i have one PvP kill. The game is obviously very early in dev, there are placeholders and shit, and it's kinda barebones, techdemo more than a game. But, it's good fun, honestly.
The TLDR, so far, is - Cycle = EFT lite.
Compared to EFT, there's no:
- Limb health system
- Bleed system
- Bone breaking system
- Hunger and Thirst system
- Day/Night cycle system (dumb, for a game called The Cycle)
- Weather system (afaik zones have their "weather" but it's local and always the same? Might be wrong)
- Flea Market
- Different ammo types per weapon
- Armor rating
- Mags (ammo magically loads in your gun from your inventory)
- Rigs, Comtacs
- Seems like "headeyes" is less of a thing, i landed quite a few headshots with a pistol and SMG on a PMC and they just kept going
What it has more than EFT does, currently:
- EXTREMELY fast deploy time, like instant
- UNREAL ENGINE (holy f*ck, whoever decided to build EFT on Unity has to get fired)
- Mining for resources
- Varied AI monsters for PvE that can be deadly but it makes sens and they never 1 shot you (no headeyes toz monsters)
- Complex, large "complexes" of buildings that have some simple "power" based locked sections and shit. EFT has some, but it's very limited and not-vertical, even if the graphical design is way more detailed.
- HUGE map (only tried one, there are 2 so far)
So, the game is very, very arcade-y compared to EFT, but you still have the survival aspect of it since you lose all your shit if you die and there's no insurance like in EFT that gives you back your items. You can only get some % of the worth of the items as money, but that's it.
PvP seems decent but also arcade-y, with headshots being less deadly and the simple health system. Amusingly, the actual movement speed is slower than EFT, even if it pretends to be "simulator".
There seem to be "skills" too but i haven't unlocked them yet and don't know how they work.