Cargo Commander

I figured I'd be cleansing the palate with what looked like a straightforward action game set in space, but Cargo Commander ended up being surprisingly layered. By all appearances, it looks like some kind of lesser Rochard knock-off: you're a blue-collar employee of an unfeeling mega-corporation whose job has stranded him in a boxy spaceship salvaging cargo containers around unstable sectors of the cosmos. Your main tools are a nailgun for defense, a power drill to create new passageways if no extant exits exist (how's that for wordplay?) and an unusually hale pair of lungs that lets you temporarily survive in the void between containers. Yet, the game immediately introduces a lot of very appealing concepts to what would otherwise be a fairly standard gravity-based sci-fi run-and-gun platformer.

For one, the game is a procedurally generated "roguelite". You create each sector of space with a seed codeword (you can write your own, or if you're suddenly bereft of imagination you can check what's popular with other players or let the game create a random string for you), which contains a certain group of cargo types. By collecting distinct cargo categories, which range from common to ultra rare, you upgrade in rank and are given permanent upgrades to yourself and your ship, such as a device that generates free ammo. The game also quickly introduces an upgrade system which allows you to have more health, gun mods, stronger drills, faster movement, survive longer in space, etc., but all these upgrades are temporary and require a currency you can generally only find by killing enemies. The enemies in this case are mutants that spawn endlessly from crystals, and you can earn a point bonus by destroying the crystals on top of the upgrade currency from the mutants.

But then you get to the core gameplay, and there's a certain set of rules to the game flow that you have to ascertain, and it's one of my favorite parts of any game like this that ends up being more than meets the eye. You start each work day by activating the big magnet on your cuboid "homeship", which draws in various other cuboid cargo containers from the near vicinity. These tend to smash violently into your homeship as well as any subsequent containers you've managed to attract, opening up gaps to and from containers, and you're never sure just how many containers you'll magnetize in one "wave". As you pass through these procedurally generated cubes, you're looking for glowing blue boxes - the titular cargo, the procurement of which is your primary goal - as well as smashing crates for various items, checking weapon lockers for new weapons and ammo and looking for the fastest way to get to the next container. Containers you've yet to explore (and your homeship) have icons that point off-screen, letting you know where you need to be heading at all times. After a certain amount of time passes, usually dependent on how many containers the current wave happened to attract, a wormhole opens and starts systematically destroying the containers in the reverse order they arrived. At this point, you can either risk exploring further while everything is falling apart, or attempt to head back to your homeship and safety - it being the only location immune to wormholes - to cash in the cargo you've found. Once you've had time to calm down, you can then start the next wave by hitting the magnet again. If you die, you lose all the cargo you have on you, but not the ones you've already returned to your ship. You can spend the brief downtime between waves to upgrade your guns and equipment at your ship and recover health and ammo, depending on which amenities you've unlocked, and keep going until you find a "sector key" in a special container that might show up in wave 3, or perhaps later in waves 5 or 6. These keys are how you unlock new areas to travel to, once you're fairly certain that you've collected every cargo type in the area and it's time to move on.

But then I haven't even covered how the game actually plays. You're running around with a couple of weapons, switching out weaker guns like the nailgun for something more substantial as the enemies grow stronger with each successive wave, and each time you enter a container cube the game has randomly determined which of the four sides is "down" for the artificial gravity. Sometimes there isn't any gravity, or you can turn it off yourself, which lets you float through the cubes. Sometimes they're filled with enemy crystals or other hazards and you might want to bail and try another container. Sometimes they're filled with explosive barrels, or the walls are made of a stronger material that can't be drilled through, or maybe the platforming inside the container is so exacting that you cut your losses and drill your way outside of the container and look for another way in higher up. Throughout all this, you have that time-limit hanging over your head ready to activate the wormhole at any moment, and there's no small amount of exhilaration as you risk heading for one more blue box or weapon locker before the container you're standing in suddenly implodes under the pressure of the wormhole and sends you whirling through space. Even if the gameplay hasn't changed much since I started, I find myself hitting that magnet again and again for one more mad dash for space loot.

Obviously, all of the above is a giant word salad, and I imagine a Quick Look would have to spend some ten minutes or so explaining all those rules as breathlessly as I did. Beyond that, the game's not overly sophisticated - once you have the sector key, the only reason to stick around is to earn the highest score in that sector - but it's definitely something I can see myself playing for a few more days just because it's found a really engrossing cycle of running/floating through containers, grabbing derelict valuables and heading back when the shit hits the fan for a well-earned breather at the home base before starting the cycle over.

It actually puts me into an odd predicament, because I want to keep playing it tomorrow and yet I can't imagine I'll find anything more to say about it. I've outlined most of its mechanics and can already recommend the game without reservation (it's a little ugly and the in-game music's annoying, but neither of those things really phase me), so I'd be stretching for more to say tomorrow. Well, maybe I'll think of something. Maybe I'll take another swing at articulating why I'm enjoying it so much, or how it's one of the simplest and best applications of a "roguelite" approach I've encountered. Maybe draw more comparisons between it and Rochard, Risk of Rain and One Way Heroics. At any rate, it's time I head off to grab a coffee and find some more cargo. Until next time.

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