CyBall

Introduction

CyBall is a futuristic football-themed (US: soccer), NFT-based game where users can collect and form a team of CyBlocs and face off against other teams online, or trade and mentor new CyBlocs within the CyBall’s ecosystem.

Cyball forms a perfect combination of genres, with sports and strategy put into one experience. The title’s world and unique characters allow the team to design compelling lore and background stories within its universe.

Gameplay

Each team consists of 3 Cyblocs, with each character having six stats to determine its strength, namely Tackling, Passing, Dribbling, Crossing, Shooting and Physical. CyBlocs are all born with a base rating for each skill, and given 1 skill point to add to any stat of the player’s choice after every level up with a cap max level at 100.

Cyblocs have 5 different rarities; Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Legendary. This directly affects your Cybloc’s max overall range and the stats attributed to each skill. Not only that, a CyBloc may have one, two or three traits. Traits can affect a multitude of areas from gameplay mechanics to potential rewards, with a total of 50 traits assigned randomly to Cyblocs.

The gameplay element is simple yet tests the player’s strategy. Once the game starts, you select one of five tactics; Ultra Defensive, Defensive, Balanced, Attacking, and Ultra Attacking. Every round highlights a specific skill and you have to put your best Cyball forward to win the round, with assistance from any of the action cards in your hand if needed.

What Cyball does so well is it puts you in both the managerial and player position so you are forced to make decisions on both fronts. If you simply trust your player to win the round because you have a higher stat in that specific round's challenge, your opponent can easily outplay you by powering up his Cybloc with the attribute boost needed to take that round off you.

This is probably why Cyball at the moment is one of the most balanced games in web3, where players with Bronze and Silver Cyblocs can easily take out Gold and higher teams as long as they play it slow and play it right. However, at the same time, the game suffers from tactics having little to no impact on the actual result. You will find yourself defaulting to Ultra Defensive just because it gives your goalkeeper a higher chance of blocking shots.

Summary

Cyball is an exciting mixture of genres, combining sports with strategy and card gameplay. The continuous content rollout from the studio as well makes for a great game to keep coming back to and experience a new feature or additional types of Cyblocs.

Nonetheless, the lack of tactical variance between the options you are prompted with at the beginning of the game and the occasional luck of the draw with your ability cards leave room for improvement.