Insanity and Mundanity Combined
Download Size: 1.7 GB
Time Played: 5.4 hrs.
Favorite Vehicle: Helicopter Car
What I'd Pay: $10
Steam Price (3/20/12): $20
Sheer absurdity can do a lot for a game. It won't jump-start a clunker, but it can allow a mediocre game to skate right into "memorable". Cargo's vehicle-construction gimmick wears thin fast, but its story & atmosphere has enough weird in it to keep you playing to the end.
Cargo! is the latest game by Ice-Pick Lodge, the creators of Pathologic and The Void, similarly strange games that were a tad... darker. Comparing Cargo! to them is like watching Full House and then learning about Bob Saget's comedy routine. Cargo! may be more family-friendly, but it still retains plenty of the weird.
In Cargo!, you play as Flawkes, an apprentice engineer delivering a shipment of weights. After Flawkes's ship is shot down by celebration fireworks, she learns that her shipment was to the Gods. See, the Gods wanted to destroy humanity, but flooding was too difficult, so they decided to just fling them all off the Earth instead. Unfortunately, they miscalculated a bit, removing the weight from just about everything, leaving behind only a few small islands. Nevertheless, they go through with their master plan to create a new race: the Buddies, small, dumb, happy folk that live for FUN. The perfect beings. Now they just need some weight to give them a place to live.
Flawkes, reluctant to go through all this work without any pay to show for it, decides to help the Gods retrieve their cargo and finish the job. She quickly learns that the Buddies produce FUN when dancing, being kidnapped, or getting kicked in the ass. FUN is used to buy equipment and, more importantly, restore weight to objects floating through the stratosphere. What follows is a tale of a typical job turned into a rebellion against the heavens via booting arrogant baby-men, building flying submarines, and sending Big Ben crashing into the ocean.
The crux of the game is vehicle piloting and construction, ala Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Over the course of the game, you build several vehicles to sail, drive, dive, and fly (or any/all of the above) with engines, propellers, wheels, and crates. Unfortunately, all of the vehicles handle awkwardly, turning or moving slowly unless you strip off most of the weight and overload it with engines. That makes generating FUN a problem, though; you need Buddies joyriding on your vehicle to generate FUN, and the maximum Buddy capacity is determined by the vehicle's weight. Thus, you often have to choose between a clumsy, blocky joyrider or a sleek vehicle that either steers like a lethargic elephant or a greased meerkat.
The story missions send you across the islands, under the ocean, and into the sky to do a variety of strange objectives. There's quite a bit of variety in them, perhaps too much; you rarely do the same thing twice, leaving skills you just learned fallow. For example, in the 2nd stage you need to dive underwater to reawaken a volcano; this is the only time in the game you need to build a submarine. Basic vehicles do the job in each mission; there's never a reason to make a flying submarine that can dive underwater, for example. You don't even need to build the vehicles yourself; the game provides plenty of blueprint pickups that immediately build premade vehicles if you have enough parts. This took a lot of the charm out of building crazy contraptions. (I still won't give up my car with helicopter blades for jumping small gaps, however.)
On the plus side, the same variety fits well with the absurdly meandering story; you know what the end goal is, but drunks could walk a straighter line towards it than this plot. Apparently engineering involves cleaning out pipe organs with naked baby-men and stealing paint from flying trains. In the background, the Gods and the Buddies discuss their creation with a blind arrogance that makes you giddy to kick them until they explode. This all culminates in a screwy, weird ending that leaves you kind of disturbed, yet satisfied.
Despite the weirdness, this is still a colorful, creative, easy game that's worth a few hours to experience. The price is a tad steep for what you get IMO, but games this weird don't come out often. Strangely, I think young kids might be the perfect audience for this game, despite the T rating. It's definitely a bit... weird ("Mom! Mom! There's ugly babies dying in the organ pipes!"), but other than some talk of the "last 2 people on Earth" marrying to repopulate the planet, I don't remember anything else really offensive. They'd probably enjoy the vehicle building and easy difficulty more than I did, too.
You heard it here first: "Reviewer declares kicking babies, rebelling against Gods perfect for children!"