It's the year 40XX; long after mankind has gone the way of the dodo, all that remains are cybirds. Built to withstand everything from sub-zero temperatures to laser cannons, the robo-fowl live a mostly harmonious life. Everything changed when Cybirdroid was founded. This mega-corporation's sole purpose is to capture and reprogram cybirds, so that they can be turned into war machines. In Featherpunk Prime, the player takes control of a cyber-flamingo. In order to rescue their friends, this warbird has to scale Cybirdroid's tower and destroy its four guardians.
Considering the title and storyline, one would be led to believe that this is a cyberpunk game, and they'd be right. The graphics and sound give off a very 80s neon vibe, like one of those talking animal animated movies that was never greenlit. The music is especially great, although there are only a small handful of tracks. There are some nice background details in every stage, which really add to the atmosphere. The enemy designs look cool and the guardians are exceptionally well-designed and animated.
The game itself is a twin-stick shooter with platformer and RPG elements. The cyber-flamingo can double jump, scale walls, dash to cover ground quickly, or slide into a crouch to dodge enemy fire. There are forty-eight floors in Cybirdroid tower, and most of them are filled with a plethora of strange creatures. Typically, the strategy revolves around playing it safe. Since there aren't any time limits or bonuses for destroying enemies quickly, it's to the player's benefit to take it slow, and use every wall and floor of the environment to their advantage.
Energy can be obtained from warbird wreckage, or caches located throughout each stage. This is the currency for the upgrade system, which can boost various stats such as max HP or damage. It's important to max out everything that affects damage. The HP bonuses aren't all that great. Consider this: a bullet takes ten hit points away from the hero. That's the equivalent of two HP level-ups. These investments are better spent on improving firepower. Enemies that are quickly wiped out have fewer opportunities to fire back. Alongside unique abilities like a triple jump, energy can also be spent on reducing damage from spikes. It sounds nice, but unlike spikes in other action-platformers, they aren't even close to being a threat in this game.
At the beginning of every stage, a random weapon can be acquired. The cyber-flamingo holds two at a time. Aside from the always dependable pistol, there are shotguns, miniguns, homing missiles, floating turrets, and all sorts of other armaments. Only two can be held at a time, and more will unlock as the game progresses. In most cases, it's better to stick with regular guns, simply because they have infinite ammo. The explosive weaponry is definitely strong, but will almost always take a secondary role. One of the more useful guns fires bullets that ricochet off of walls. Due to enemies being around every corner, a weapon for handling those situations is quite nice.
The stages all have randomised layouts. Presumably this is supposed to increase the replay value, but the layouts get repetitive very quickly. The lack of enemy variety also becomes noticeable before long. The designs are creative and interesting, but the warbirds rarely diverge from chasing the hero, while firing away. There's also the enemies that stand around… and fire away, or the turrets that do the same thing. Since there's no incentive for flamingos to move quickly through each stage, they can keep themselves far away, which trivialises most encounters. A more diverse array of enemies with unique patterns or abilities would have done wonders for the game. In lieu of a time limit, some sort of Death cyber-toucan would appear, and hunt the hero down. Perhaps other stages could have different gimmicks, such as a constantly rotating play field. If this isn't possible, then something as simple as more layouts would have been sufficient.
The bosses are all very diverse and wonderfully realised. For the most part, they're fairly designed, aside from one exception. The third boss can shift into an entirely different phase. It's almost like a brand-new fight, which will throw off players that adjusted to the previous patterns. The only other annoyance is that the closest checkpoints are still pretty far from the bosses, which means that if somebody loses, they have to play through five stages to get another shot. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that this presents another opportunity to collect energy. Still, most players would prefer the chance to immediately refight the boss.
