Developer: Ice Pick Lodge
Publisher: bitComposer Games, Viva Media
Genre: Action, Adventure
Platforms: PC
Release Date: 21 April 2011
ESRB Rating: T for Teen (Cartoon Violence, Comic Mischief, Mild Language, Partial Nudity)
Ice Pick Lodge’s latest work is quite a departure from the visual style and tone of previous projects. This is no bad thing, as indeed the trailers for Cargo!: The Quest For Gravity promise an open world with endless vehicle design possibilities and above all else: FUN! Now, if I had written this review after playing the game for just two hours, it would have been glowing. Unfortunately, I played Cargo for much longer than that, unearthing several issues. That does not mean to say that it is a bad game; I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, despite a few problems bad enough to cause frustration.
The Narrative
Cargo’s story follows a sort of distorted Noah’s Ark scenario where the gods – three mechanical faces known as ‘Demiurges’ – have flooded the world and reduced it to a group of island archipelagos, wiping out most of the humans in the process. Oh, and did I mention that they also abolished gravity? The leftover islands are populated by new life-forms called ‘buddies,’ described by the game’s blurb as “pint-sized creatures, unbound by gravity’s forces and free to float and frolic at their own whim and leisure.” What that means is that they are small, dwarf-like, fat, naked, bald men with no survival instinct whatsoever that fly into the sky and explode like fireworks when kicked enough. One thing these little fellows excel at is having fun, which is the game’s currency. Using FUN, the player must wrest control from the Demiurges and restore gravity to Earth.
The game’s story is given to the player through dialogue and events, beginning with some of the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard in a game. The protagonist, Flawkes, along with her teacher/captain, Borkin, are flying to deliver an order of mechanical bits and bobs when a buddy shoots through their craft causing them to crash into a small group of islands. Borkin, though, could be sitting in an armchair with a cup of tea for all the drama in his voice. What follows is a journey through the four seasons and a progression from small, wind-powered rafts to helicopters and aeroplanes of your own devising. The journey is littered with discussions between the three ‘gods’, with asides questioning the truths and motivations in what they say from a fourth mechanical face floating in blackness every now and again. My favourite characters, though, were the three musical buddies who sing to describe what is going on and what happens next.
The story is fairly simple, really, but is shrouded in a sequence of events that seems to do its best to confuse the player. Should I be crossing to the other island or saving the drowning buddies? I was told to do both, but by the time I realized that I had to cross to the other island in order to find a blueprint that allowed me to save those stranded in the sea, they had drowned. No matter, says the game, just throw some more junk into the sinkhole to make more buddies come out of the volcano. It even shows an aerial view to aid the player, but could I find it? No. So I settled for using the fun I’d earned by kicking buddies (which is immensely satisfying: they gurgle and cheer when kicked over and over again until they pop like fireworks leaving trails of flowers and colours behind them!) to get some junk out of the Stratosphere. Doing this increases the number of buddies available. I chose the item that increased the number of buddies the most and in so doing accidentally shifted the game forward a season, completely changing everything. I didn’t mind, but some warning would have been nice, as I thought the first quarter of the game would last more than ten minutes!
The Design
Cargo is marketed as having physics-driven gameplay (quite literally, when the Large Hadron Collider puts in a guest appearance!). Aside from my small gripe – if gravity really has been abolished, why does Flawkes not drift off into space when she jumps? – it all works rather well. Certainly, no one can criticize the game for being boring. In the first hour, I had run around kicking buddies, been swimming, sailed a raft, built a speedboat, raced against penguins in a car of my own design and piloted a submarine. Granted, some things in the game seem fairly randomly jammed in, such as the ‘races’ in winter where you can’t lose… There are a few of them, all the same. But then it’s worth it just to look back and imagine the look on your face when, as a reward, a paddle steamer drops out of the sky. And during those moments when landmarks and monuments are slowly plummeting towards Earth, I felt a genuine sense of awe.
Overall, the vehicle controls work well, but would benefit greatly from a ‘hold altitude/depth’ button as there are only so many times you can hit the icy roof and the sea floor in your submarine before it grows tiresome. It is also worth mentioning that the vehicle blueprints available in-game are very basic in some cases. So, if you intend to actually fly, you need to fit wheels, for example, so the propellers are not resting on the ground. This does, however, force you into putting more thought into your ride rather than just saying, “Oh, I’ll click the blueprint and be done with it.” There is a magnificent realm of creation here, like an open box of Legos just beckoning you to play. Plus, you have to consider balance when creating your craft: too light and your super-speedboat will just flip when you hit the power; too many life-belts and your sub will be hopelessly stranded on the surface. I love this aspect and it’s possible to spend hours refining speed rigs, giant rigs and just-plain-silly rigs, not to mention the fun to be had by taking them for a test drive!
By far, my biggest criticism of this game is the lack of objective indicator. There is not even a map, so it is impossible to work out where you are in relation to where you need to be. Sometimes, it’s down to the player making a lucky guess at what to do because the advice provided in-game is laughably vague. For instance, at one point you are told to restart the volcano. Ok. But you are trapped under ice with no idea where to go. I got around this by exploiting a graphical glitch that allowed you to see through the ice if you squashed Flawkes’ face against it enough. I later discovered that there are railway signs hinting at which way to go, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. Silly me.
The Presentation
Many aspects of Cargo’s presentation are striking. The most striking of all (in a bad way) is the quality of the translation: there are even spelling mistakes in the trailer. I read that there were similar problems in previous games; should they have learned? Probably. But with such a golden idea, we can cut the Russian developers some slack, especially when they patch the translations in the end.
The visual appeal of the game is made very clear from the outset. The whole thing screams FUN at the player with bold colours and beautiful animations. I am seriously impressed by some of the details: Big Ben, for example, is rendered with breath-taking fidelity. In other places, however, such as when the Demiurges are speaking, rather than cutting directly from one to another, the camera flicks incessantly back to Flawkes for the briefest of moments. It’s enough to make the player blink and wonder what just happened. Yet, this is just a small blemish on an otherwise well-executed graphical system.
The music is easily the most impressive feature of Cargo. Not only is the game’s soundtrack perfectly suited to the tone of the game with a jolly ambience created throughout, but the player can import his own music for the buddies to dance to. But as amusing as it is watching thirty bald men performing a jig to Motorhead, it spoils the atmosphere somewhat, so I found this feature novel but actually stuck to the jovial humming and apparent beat-boxing sounds of the game’s music. My favourite moments had to be when three buddies on a stage performed songs of rhyming limericks for the player. Every single time these guys turned up I was smiling long before they finished their song and vanished in a puff of smoke.
Ice Pick Lodge’s previous outings in Pathologic and The Void were far more overtly sinister than Cargo. Yet, if you look beyond the colourful sounds and images, the tone of this game has a very dark edge, as well. The isolation of the main character is made apparent by Borkin’s offer to start a family with her; he goes so far as to say that they ought to breed something, even if it is buddies. As one of the last humans alive, the moral implications resonate if you think on them too hard. There are also these disembodied heads travelling around on rails issuing objectives in the form of things the player is forbidden to do. They are responsible for the annihilation of mankind yet remain ambivalent about that fact.
Then there are the messages that appear on-screen during play; they range from the oddly creepy, “Having fun yet?” to the soul-destroying, “Humans DO disappoint!” The sinister undertones reach their climax in the closing stages of the game’s story where the player is directly accused of wasting hours of his ‘worthless’ life playing the game. But that’s ok, because he turned that time into FUN, and FUN is the highest state of being! For a buddy. And that is exactly why I love to hate to love this game.
And so I’ll end on a little rhyming song,
Like those three lil’ buddies who move things along.
This game it has boats and airplanes and racing,
To help overcome the perils you’re facing,
And after the story is all said and done,
You can play ‘sandbox mode’ and have some more fun.
Sometimes this game can be rather upsetting,
But if you start to play then I’ll be betting,
That though the game’s quality moves to and fro,
You need only play for an hour to know,
You’ll be back later and again tomorrow.
Such is the strange pull of this game called Cargo!
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