Cargo Commander
I knew there'd be a catch. Well, it's not so much one big issue with the game than the combination of several smaller ones, but I think the honeymoon is over either way. If you didn't check out yesterday's May Mastery, I was effusive about Serious Brew's Cargo Commander: a gravity-switching sci-fi shooter/platformer with procedurally generated stages and an emphasis on fast, priority-driven loot collecting. No need to run down all the various rules again, so let's move onto how the mid- to late-game looks like.
Any game has to find an effective difficulty curve to maintain player interest. This becomes a hard sell when your game emphasizes randomized levels of randomized challenge levels and de-emphasizes needing to stick around after you found the "sector key" in any given area, which lets you hop out and try somewhere else. There's six types of cargo, randomly determined for each sector, and it's worth staying around until you have one of all six so you aren't missing one of the game's elusive "ultra rare" cargo types. Beyond finding the six cargo types and the sector key, however, you're pretty much done and can move onto the next sector unless you're really invested in going as long as possible for the region's high score. If you're just there to complete the game's single-player mode by finding as many different cargo types as possible, the game has a relatively easy if repetitive cycle. That's why the game elects to enforce a difficulty curve by making the one wave that gives you the region's sector key take longer and longer to arrive as you rank up and earn more perks and permanent upgrades. The idea is that a high-level player would be able to marathon several more waves without dying and having to start over. In practice it makes each zone last way longer, either because of the time it takes for the sector key to emerge or the number of times you'll die before it gets there or probably both, and actually serves to create the exact opposite effect regarding the player's desire to keep going.
Of course, you could simply hit the magnet over and over and never leave the safe confines of your ship until the wave of the sector key finally appears, but that would take almost exactly as long and would be boring as heck. I've yet to determine if you can abort a wave early, though, so I'll stick that idea on the back-burner for the time being. The second big issue, and this could either be with the game or my PC, is that when there's a lot of enemies and objects on the screen the game's framerate shudders down to some regrettably tiny number. The game itself doesn't appear to be too graphically intensive for this system, no disrespect intended, so the framerate might be the game's side. It becomes particularly bad close to the end of the wave when the wormhole is destroying everything, because the game will often spawn in a lot more crystals in the various containers to make the trip back that much more perilous. It's hard to aim or jump effectively when the game is stuttering so badly and so the chances are whenever you enter a container with a lot of enemies, you'll be ineffective at fighting them off and will probably die as a result. What's worse is that each successive wave in any sector will have more enemies each time, putting the sector key even further out of reach.
It's not all bad though. Cargo Commander continues to introduce genuinely game-changing upgrades as you continue to rank up, including a means to find out whether or not a sector has a type of ultra rare cargo you need to complete a set by attaching a scanner to that specific cargo variety - these scanners are finite and cannot be reassigned, unfortunately - and just recently I've acquired a permanent weapons locker in my ship, giving me a free alternate weapon every time I start. I'm hoping for more scanners and more starting money in the ranks to come, though for now it looks like I'll get a permanent laser sight for my weapons next. That could help.
This will be the last time I write a May Mastery entry for Cargo Commander, with something brand new for tomorrow. I figured I'd quickly hit the rank needed to go home and complete the game today, but these new wrinkles have made that a far more challenging and time-consuming prospect. As it stands, I cannot seem to live long enough to earn the next sector key, and I'm stuck here until I manage it. Still, I could always just "git gud", as they say.
The Verdict: Even with this irritating late-game design flaw, I won't be writing off Cargo Commander because it does so much right with its gameplay cycle and is an important milestone in the quixotic quest of game design to find intriguing new ways to build games around procedural generation. I give this a solid recommendation. Four stars.
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