Capes Review in Progress – Great Idea, Not so Great Execution
Capes is an isometric turn-based strategy RPG developed by Spitfire Interactive and published by Daedelic Entertainment. In Capes, you control a band of superheroes against a mysterious adversary that is just named The Company. It is a simple premise, and one that I thoroughly enjoyed. The gameplay style and storyline work very well together in certain ways, at least for a little while. Capes is a game that starts off with a level of fairness that slowly but surely becomes more fundamentally flawed and frustrating. Unfortunately it eventually reached the point of being something I had to put down. But first, let us go over some of the stuff the game does very well.
Setting and Presentation of Capes
One of the things Capes excels at is its setting. In King City, the many heroes have to either fight against or escape from The Company. The Company being ambiguously named I think is a very good idea. As their actions speak louder than any menacing title, they would give themselves. We see everything from innocent civilians being arrested and stuck in cages to them rounding up groups of heroes and torturing them. There are even scenes of people just lying around bloodied and people bound to contraptions. It creates a threatening undercurrent of menace that keeps you going narratively.
The other thing about its setting that I really enjoyed was the art style and how cutscenes played out. The game applies a very simple yet stylistic design to every hero. Rebound wears a beanie, shirt and regular pants that offsets the idea that she’s a standard hero. Her attitude even reflects more a rebellious spirit that I enjoyed very much. Meanwhile, someone like Mercurial sports a retro-futuristic style to her design that makes her look the part and takes every situation more seriously.
This leads to everyone in the main cast having either high-key or low-key designs dependent on their personalities. Another strong part of the presentation is how the dialogue boxes in cutscenes match that of a comic book word balloon with every line voiced outside of some of the story setting details like “Back at the lair”. It all fits very well from the seamless transitions from cutscene to gameplay. It does feel like a missed opportunity that this aesthetic was not taken to something more fitting, like comic page turnings for example.
Strong and Varied Gameplay with Modern Music
The combat in Capes can feel great in the opening levels of the game. The game gives you a good understanding of each character’s unique mechanics through easy-to-follow tutorials. Battles are designed around those mechanics to get a feel for how they work. Every hero feels good to use in most scenarios, too. For instance, Rebound is very mobile and specializes in backstabs. One of her abilities is a twirling attack that can position her far away. Her normal movement provides a very generous range, allowing her to take down multiple foes in a single turn.
There also certain missions where you have stealth elements allowing her to shine. But there are also more tank-y characters. Facet, for instance, I ensured never left my team due to the fact he has the most hit points and an ability to reduce damage taken. He is also able to root enemies to the ground and shield allies. There are many different characters that give you unique dynamics to take on the different contents of the game. Such as the Team Up skills that allow certain characters to augment certain skills. For instance, when Rebound is near Mercurial and uses her standard attack skill, Mercurial will add the ability to disarm foes.
The aesthetic is wrapped up with some incredibly cool and modern music. There are mixes of hip-hop beats, and techno really captures every level and moment. Unfortunately, there are two sides of the coin for this game and the bad has dramatically overshadowed the good.
Lack of Motivation from the Characters in Capes
Every character in the game feels constructed for their gameplay utility as opposed to being generally great characters. It results in these characters doing little to push the plot forward. That responsibility falls to the villains and the leader of the group of heroes. As a result, I never truly cared about any of the optional character side stories that do reward skill points, but the quantities do not match the quality of the upgrade. For example, some side stories will reward four skill points when five are needed and the upgrades feel minimal.
Every character eventually has their optional side story to tackle alongside the main campaign. The problem is each side story fleshes out certain characters, but the results or details of those side stories never come into play for the main plot.
For example, a side story involving Rebound revolves around her grabbing a laptop for her ex-girlfriend. The work her ex-girlfriend was doing tied directly into the main narrative but it was never actually incorporated. This feels like a major missed opportunity that would reward the time and effort it took to complete the side quest itself.
It is not an isolated instance either. Later in the game, you find WeatherVane. His mission takes you to visit his parents, and the result of that side story revolves around him feeling more inspired and confidant to save people. But this character-building moment never shines in any moments in the story afterwards. The worst part is the fact that everyone’s vocal performances are very underwhelming. There are many moments in the game where everyone sees people dying and their performances feel like they are commenting on the situation, as opposed to actually reacting to it.
Repetition in Gameplay and Lackluster Challenges
While there is a lot of enemy variety, and different mechanics for each character, it gets dull very quickly when the only way Capes spices itself up is with more volume of standard grunt-like enemies. It is a shame since the game incorporates more interesting ones that have swords or androids that have laser guns.
Enemies can either have certain weapons you can disarm and big guys that you can root to the ground and take care of with ranged abilities. Annoyingly, when you are shoved in a small environment with multiple groups encroaching on you, it starts to become more stressful than it’s worth even when there is plenty of time to think. Due to the difficulty of being able to balance and dispatch the sheer number of foes in the arena. This also makes caring about the challenges hard to do when you are fighting for survival. The game also does not give nearly enough time to use team up attacks or disarming of foes. There are many challenges that just feel out of place for the arena they are in.
The challenges in the early game felt natural, but in the later sections of the game they start to become too detrimental. When there are requirements for a specific number of ultimate’s to be cast, waiting and earning those ultimates can lead to characters getting knocked out. Which conflicts with that challenge as a result. This is also a problem when the skill trees are reliant on the skill points earned through these challenges. Another problem with the gameplay is the animation for ultimate abilities. These are great and feel cool to watch. But when you are doing them consistently, I just wish they would have a skip button. Especially when the camera is panned out as opposed to being up close on the character performing the ultimate.
All of this can be overlooked, considering the game is not a big triple A developed game. But there are a lot of moments that made me walk away for a while.
Multiple Breaking Points
Outside of the aforementioned small environment being filled with tons of enemies. There are certain story moments that left me feeling frustrated and forced me to lower the difficulty to progress, until a certain point. During the campaign, you have to save a character on top of a roof where there are multiple turrets that will hit you if you move within their sight. You can remove this problem by using Facet’s crystallization ability.
But when you need to save the person, they are put into a down but not out state. From here, they only have a few turns to stay down before dying and resetting the fight. This forces you to be more aggressive, but the rooftop is filled with dangerous foes that respawn constantly. This section was not very fun. Though the next big moment in the campaign is what made me put it down, even when I tried every team composition I could.
In a big fight with one of the main villains, you are put into a small warehouse with a small number of foes to deal with. Every time you take out enough chunks of the boss’s health, he will open up a few cages to free hostages and give more foes to deal with. The problem with all of this is that he can mind control the hostages and force them to attack you. The only way to prevent them from dying is by focusing on disarming them and freeing them from the mind control. This gives the player three main threats that you have to balance and deal with. The boss throws out bolts that ensure if you try to hit him, you miss. You also take damage from the bolt itself.
I feel like if he just focused on mind control and did no direct damage or debuffs until he saw that he was alone, that it would be a manageable fight. I went in with three different team compositions, with a tactic of being aggressive and killing him quickly. But that left me with too many foes to disarm and move away from and got overwhelmed. Then when I tried to take it slow, it became too much of a balancing act with the boss’s attacks. This was all mechanically too punishing and difficult even on the easiest difficulty. Ehe difficulty settings only increase your team’s health and grant additional time to revive them if they go down.
Closing Review-In-Progress Remarks on Capes
Capes has a great setting and presentation, with some honestly cool and engaging gameplay mechanics. However, when it comes to the difficulty scaling, and the characters themselves. It is hard to feel motivated to go back in or continue. I wanted to finish this game, but it is just not motivating me to do so. This ultimately left me with a game I cannot recommend as of right now due to the absurd difficulty spikes, even if I am able to finish it in the future. It is going to be hard to recommend it for different reasons.
Capes is set to launch on May 29th for $39.99 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4|5, Nintendo Switch and Steam.
