It is the distant future. Mankind’s insatiable vanity has come to a peak wherein they can finally create and replace parts of themselves with little to no effort through prosthetics. In amassing and collecting such prostheses, humans have made strides in keeping healthy as well since the prostheses have aided in longevity as well as physical and mental fortitude. However, the usage of such prostheses have opened up the threat of being attacked or hacked through any and all connected cybernetics.
The Daybreak faction, followers of a radicalist dogma, believe that there is more to just humanity reveling in their newfound leap in preserving their mortality. Daybreak developed the Alpha Virus—a powerful, mass-altering disease that only affects prostheses.
Granted that almost everyone in this future has some form of prosthesis attached to their body, the Alpha Virus brutally corrupts their physical being and turns them into what is called the Corroded—corpses that walk among the living, powered only through the Alpha Virus itself. The Corroded emerge from portals called Sinkholes throughout the city and threaten the daily lives of many. But through the intervention of the Vanguard, humanity has a fighting chance at surviving Daybreak’s tyranny.
You are one such member of the Vanguard—the captain of a ragtag bunch of fighters and vigilantes who want to put an end to the Corroded invasion through the operations of your base in Skyline City, humanity’s last bastion. Incite your soldiers in this war and stage your Cyber Rebellion.
The publishers of Tales of Wind, Chronicle of Infinity, League of Pantheon’s, and Immortal Awakening—Neocraft Limited—bring forth a dark and gritty sci-fi auto battler RPG: Cyber Rebellion. Leap into the turmoil plaguing Skyline City and command a handful of brave warriors to save what remains of humanity in a cyberpunk storyline that will leave your data streams overflowing.
Are you ready to put an end to the grip that the Alpha Virus has on your fellow man? Have you just picked up this game and wish to know how to play it better? You’ve come to the right place—read our Cyber Rebellion beginner’s guide below and get ready to keep Daybreak at bay!
A Glimpse into Cyber Rebellion
Cyber Rebellion is a hero collector RPG that prides itself in its unique nuances compared to most hero collector RPGs on the market.
Similar to games that put an original twist to RPG combat such as the likes of Knighthood, Cookie Run Kingdom, or Neural Cloud, Cyber Rebellion recreates turn-based combat as something of its own signature. When the heroes, or Combatants, of the player and enemy teams simply perform their basic attacks, this is treated as a phase in combat—let’s call this the Combat Phase.
The Tactics Phase, which happens when you—the Commander—have your Tactics Points filled, is where strategy comes into play. Without saying so much about this since we’ll be covering it in our guide below, the Tactics Phase is when each Combatant gets to perform devastatingly spectacular skills. Naturally, the team with the most Combatant left standing is the winner in most battles.
Despite it being a hero collector RPG, Cyber Rebellion’s pool of heroes is actually quite minimal. Instead, what you roll for (or pull for, in the average gacha player’s jargon) are different kinds of prostheses which don’t only change the Combatant’s appearance, but their abilities and overall fighting style as well.
Granted that this is the theme of the game wherein the war for cybernetics has hit an ugly turn in the form of the Alpha Virus, you can have multiple copies of the same Combatant but they each have to have different prosthesis sets. To further illustrate, you can have the Combatant named Saki in your team twice over, but one of her prostheses has to be different from the other, or else deploying her twice simply can’t be done.
The game also boasts of an interesting plot that will keep you wanting to know more. For starters, there is a voice in your Commander’s head who constantly questions what is happening around you and somehow knows about Daybreak and their motives. Only you can uncover how your character fits in all this and how they can help make Skyline City a safer place.
Play Through the Campaign
A decent RPG should have a decent story. Of course, this certainly depends on the games we’re talking about.
To anyone unaware, you can have a brain-dead easy RPG with little-to-no story or a completely linear one with an excuse plot (Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, we’re looking at you), but it’s almost always a given that good RPGs in general have stories that need to be told. These stories immerse the player into showing them that they are a part of the world before them and that they should care about its goings-on.
Though, in some cases, especially in RPGs made for mobile, the campaign is usually made to reward players who can get far enough into the story. The farther a player goes, the more rewards they end up collecting. Though, this isn’t always granted to you in material form.
The best rewards you can reap from playing solely through the campaign are functional at most. These are things like new modes, places where you can grind to get better duds for your Combatants, extra character slots, and many more.
Advancing through the campaign is your bread and butter for the most part since your progress in the campaign usually dictates how advanced you are of a player. Player level merely denotes your overall progress—it means that you might’ve unlocked more features than players whose levels are lesser than yours.
One simple way you can find the upper hand in any fight is to properly strategize as a fight goes on.
Fight with Sound Strategy and Tactics
The RPG genre is no stranger to strategy.
In many RPG titles, strategy is an important part of the game. It’s a factor that helps the player make important decisions that may make or break certain battles. That means to say that RPGs aren’t just games wherein you have a group of heroic entities mindlessly swinging their arms at the forces of darkness—these characters need to fight with purpose in order to properly win. In many of Cyber Rebellion’s settings, the game may come off as an auto battler where numbers trump strategy, but that’s actually far from the truth.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, the combat of this game has two phases: the Combat Phase and the Tactics Phase. During the Combat Phase, the Combatants on both sides will pelt each other with their basic attacks. They will all attack randomly—prioritizing no particular targets on the opposing side. Each basic attack performed by a Combatant generates Tactical Energy for their respective side. This is quite important to remember since it isn’t just the player character that can take full advantage of the Tactics Phase.
When one side’s Tactics Points have been filled, they enter the Tactics Phase wherein they get to unleash the powerful skills of a character (though, we will talk about this at length in the next bullet). The numbers on each skill to be cast are the amount of Tactics Points they require. Naturally, if you lack these, they cannot be cast at the moment. More importantly, if you notice that an enemy has performed a particular skill that you don’t want repeated, it’s good to focus your skills on that one enemy and take them out of the fight for good.
That said, it’s also important to take note of the enemy’s Combatants’ classes (as well as your own). Cyber Rebellion boasts of a total of 4 different classes. Below is a list of them as well as a brief description of each:
- Assault — These are Combatants that excel in high single-target damage but aren’t very good at area of effect. Their icon is a single upright bullet.
- Destroyer — This class is similar to the Assault except what they trade for area-of-effect damage is their speed. This means that they don’t often strike as soon as their peers during the Combat Phase. Their icon is represented by a column of three loaded bullets.
- Tank — A class needed for the front lines. While not quick, the Tank has skills that can provide cover for their friends or protect them outright from damage. Tanks soak up damage while your other Combatants can focus on cutting the enemy down to size. A Tank’s icon is a mighty shield.
- Support — The Support class exists to provide friends with healing or buffs. Occasionally, the Support may also apply debuffs onto the enemy. They’re essential when brute force is no longer an option. The icon of the Support class is a heart.
A Combatant’s class icon is always displayed next to their life bar during battle, allowing the player to quickly distinguish which Combatants are quite dangerous if kept alive long enough. This also opens up several avenues for you to exercise due strategy when approaching a fight. Granted that your Combatants will attack the enemy completely at random during the Combat Phase, it’s during the Tactics Phase wherein you can make the appropriate decisions in bringing the battle ever closer to an end.
A simple tactic that you can exercise is to take out the enemy Support first. The logic behind this is you destroy the enemy’s supply of healing and/or buffs. Without a Support on the enemy team, their chances of survival will be greatly crippled.
Another tactic you can try is to kill off any Destroyer or Assault-class units on the enemy team. The Assault types might be more dangerous in the sense that they can put your Tank out of commission whereas the Destroyer types are experts at damaging your whole party. Picking either one of these classes to eliminate is important since they’ll also most likely be supplied by the enemy Support. That said, try not to prioritize the enemy Tank—it’s their job to draw your attention and soak up damage!
When it comes to the Tactics Phase, don’t spend all your points. There are little nuances here that you need to take note of.
Cast Your Skills Sparingly
Your Tactics Points have been filled. Is going for an all-out attack always the best option?
The short answer is “no”, but here’s the long answer. Each Combatant has an array of two active skills—at least one of these is a regular skill that they can perform every now and then and one of them is an Ultimate Skill, or Ult for short. You can have a total of 5 Combatants in your team. Whenever you enter the Tactics Phase, you will have a set number of skills that will pop up below, and this isn’t the full list of skills from all of your Combatants.
Perhaps this one skill you’ve been waiting for isn’t there or you have too many skills coming from the same Combatant. It happens. It’s safe to keep in mind that the Tactics Phase is like playing a random hand of cards—sometimes it can be a weak hand, and other times it can be powerful.
The point we’re trying to get across is that you can’t choose what skills pop up and sometimes it’s best to make a turn pass if you want to get the skills you need for a particular situation. Take for example, you have a Combatant that can heal (Levya – Zealody is an example). She has a party-wide healing skill that costs 3 Tactics Points to use.
When it pops up, it certainly makes no sense to use it when all of your Combatants’ health bars are full if all you’re doing is casting for the sake of casting. Don’t use this one, and instead, try to use something else—not only will this move the battle along, but you’ll keep the healing skill in your hand for when you really need it.
The timing of casting Ultimate Skills matters greatly as well. Combatants with the rank of A and above will generate energy as they perform their basic attacks during the Combat Phase. You can learn of a Combatant’s rank by checking the Combatant Menu and seeing the large, glowing letter next to their name. That aside, you can upgrade an Ult twice in a fight. When an Ult is at maximum power, it will have the word “Upgrade” on it when you are in the Tactics Phase.
A max-powered Ult can really make all the difference in a fight since it does so much more than an underpowered Ult, but that is if you only leave it there to charge until ready. This isn’t to say that you should squander your Ult usage, however, it only makes a huge difference if you cast your Ult at maximum capacity. Casting any of these—even at low power—is entirely up to your discretion.
There will be fights where tactics and strategy alone won’t save you. You’ll need your Combatants outfitted with the very best equipment you can find.
Upgrade Combatants Through Any Means Available
At one point, you will encounter a fight wherein winning is nigh impossible. If it’s at all possible, it’d be an uphill climb because the enemy won’t die as easily as they did in your last battle.
Granted that Cyber Rebellion is an RPG, getting equipment for your Combatants is surely inevitable. But what kind of equipment exists in a world where plasma rifles can be found in a bargain bin at your local supermarket? Okay, we’re kidding about that, but that certainly looks like the world your Commander lives in.
That aside, the equipment and upgrades in this game are completely different from what you’d imagine. Instead of looking for the latest model of your high frequency katana that could possibly cut through nanomachines, one of the things you need to upgrade your Combatants with is called a Skill Code.
Skill Codes are special equipment pieces that are installed in the different skills of each of your Combatants. Instead of directly modifying their statistics, these items improve the efficacy of each of their skills, hence their names.
Skill Codes come with different tiers or, as they’re called in-game, versions. Higher versions allow for better skills, so looking for Skill Codes with higher versions will make your Combatants more powerful whenever they cast specific skills (it all matters where you equip the Skill Codes).
We recommend putting your best Skill Codes in a Combatant’s most powerful skill. For instance, if a Combatant is a Support that can heal, put the Skill Code with the highest version in the healing skill. That said, Skill Codes aren’t universal—they’re all sorted according to the different classes in the game. This means that you can’t give an Assault Combatant the Skill Code of a Tank Combatant.
Skill Codes aside, there is always the traditional way of strengthening a Combatant—through leveling up. In the Combatant menu, tap the Train tab on the Combatant you wish to level up. Here, you are presented with the wireframe hologram of the running Combatant.
To level up a Combatant, simply tap the Level Up button to send them up 5 levels (however, you may adjust the slider to indicate how many levels you’d want them to get promoted). You’ll be spending currencies called TacData as well as Secured Coins.
When a Combatant reaches a threshold, which is every 5 levels, they will need to be broken through—a process which increases their maximum level by 5. This extra process will require a resource called Exceed Axes, which can be obtained by playing the campaign. Be warned that higher levels will require more high quality Exceed Axes and usually at higher amounts.
There’s one thing you might be wondering, though: where do you get Skill Codes and/or TacData? Simple—all you need to do is fight in the R&D Facility which can be found by hitting the Traverse button and then tapping the World Map button.
At the bottom, you should see a button that says R&D Facility. This is where you can choose to get either TacData from the Resource Development and Skill Codes from the Skill Code Research. You will have to fight through special waves of enemies which increase in strength with every victory. Don’t let this deter you, however, you get better loot the stronger they are!
Lastly, there is also increasing a Combatant’s star level. This can only be done if you’ve been trying to pull for new Combatants using the Gacha system wherein you are rewarded with Anima Chips. Anima Chips are a special currency needed to star up any Combatant. Combatants ranked below the S tier may use the general Anima Chips but those of S tier and above will require specific Anima Chips from duplicate Combatants. You can get specific Anima Chips by pulling duplicates of existing Combatants or by developing the prosthetics of your chosen Combatant through Fission.
Speaking of Fission…
Use Fission for Higher-Grade Prostheses
The character pool of Cyber Rebellion is rather small.
Apart from your usual Combatants, Rik and Saki, you also have people like Levya, Candido, Lindsay, Pastoral, and Frost. This isn’t including the few other Combatants that can be obtained solely through pulling the Gacha, but this is almost the entire cast of the game.
Somehow, storywise, they’re all connected in the sense that Pastoral might actually be working with the Vanguard, but not exactly. We’ll let you figure that out yourself, but we digress. Our point here is that while the character pool is small, the Combatants we’ve mentioned can become stronger through Fission.
Fission is a means to upgrade your Combatants by making them go up a tier in rating. This is completely separate from stars or level—Fission alters a Combatant completely and gives them new attacks, skills, and an entirely new look.
As it goes with the theme of Cyber Rebellion as a whole, what Fission does is to overhaul a person’s appearance and physical capabilities. They can change in height, body mass, the material of their body, and more. In fact, one of Lindsay’s possible Fissions is an entire robot body that has her consciousness operating it.
That said, making a Combatant undergo Fission is a permanent process (unless you have duplicates of the Combatant). Think of it as, in another RPG, a class change wherein the character changes their class from one to another. This isn’t far from the truth since some Fissions will allow certain characters who start out as a specific class turn into something else entirely.
For example, Candido starts out as a Tank, but along the line, one of his other Fissions allows him to become a Destroyer. However, he still has a path that will allow you to keep his Tank class if need be. Keep in mind that you may switch the Fissions before confirming them by tapping the button that looks like an arrow cycle. After this, the change is permanent and you can’t downgrade the Combatant.
To get materials that your Combatants needs to become eligible for Fission, you only need to constantly play the campaign. As you progress, you’ll encounter material of higher quality which will allow you to achieve even higher-tiered Fissions. Aim for the top and keep fighting through the story!
The campaign isn’t just the only mode you can play. Trying other modes will also reward you with cool stuff to help you become stronger!
Attempt Other Modes for More Swag
Much like other RPGs in the mobile landscape today, Cyber Rebellion is no slouch in giving its players different modes to conquer.
Campaign aside, you have special modes that you can play in the Cyber Siege. Since this is a beginner’s guide, we’ll only cover the two modes that will be available to you early on: Merc Frenzy and the Holosim Challenge. Both modes already give plenty of reason for you to try them, but let’s keep things simple.
Merc Frenzy is a mode wherein you will challenge a slew of different bosses. The clincher here is that, unlike bosses from the Campaign or R&D that give you hints on how to beat them, the bosses in Merc Frenzy have you going in completely blind. While it may sometimes be straightforward, you will require a team that’s more prepared.
Upon besting the Solo Challenges, you will have the opportunity to fight the same boss you’ve beaten recently but alongside other players whose teams will assist you. The rewards from Merc Frenzy are Implants which you can equip your Combatants with to fine-tune their abilities. These Implants also get stronger if you equip them as sets, so go beat yourself some bosses and build your Combatants better!
The Holosim Challenge is also a mode where you fight bosses but the bosses come in the form of Combatants and their different Fissions. For instance, the first Combatant you encounter is Saki. Upon defeating her the first time, you will start to fight her at increasingly more powerful versions of her Fissions which will demand stronger Combatants on your end as you progress through her challenge. Fighting through the challenge will earn you a variety of prizes such as Anima Chips and CompCores (the premium currency of the game).
Occasionally, you may even earn Tesseracts. A complete run of a Holosim Challenge will net you an extraordinarily rare reward such as a Perfect Skill Code or Awakening Cores which are used to pull for Combatants that cannot be obtained through Fission. Challenge yourself with the Holosim Challenge!
Cyber Siege aside, there is also the Arena where you can challenge other Commanders and their teams. In winning these battles, you will be rewarded with Victory Points which can help you earn valuable things from the Arena Store. These range from Tesseracts to Omni Shards which can be used to star up your S-ranked Combatants without getting their duplicates. There are also Summit Points which you can gain from the Summit Arena, but that’s a whole different ball game. Make your Combatants strong enough and maybe you’ll be able to participate in these legendary matches.
As a whole, Cyber Rebellion can seem like a numbers game but it’s always during the Tactical Phase of combat that might shift the tide of the fight in your favor. Just remember the following things you’ve learned from this guide:
- The Campaign rewards you plenty by playing through it. It even gives you stuff necessary for Fission.
- Keep your head on your shoulders! Single-out dangerous enemies and know your classes. It could save your hide in a fight.
- Always look forward to upgrading your Combatants. Wits alone won’t win your battles!
- Play through the other modes of the game. You’ll never know what you’ll find here.
This concludes our beginner’s guide for Cyber Rebellion. Suit up, head out, and save Skyline City. You are humanity’s only hope from the Alpha Virus. Good luck!
Are you an experienced commander? Have you also been infected by the Alpha Virus and survived? Do you have high-quality Fissions for all the Combatants in your team? Leave your thoughts in the comment area below!