Space. Space is vast, cold, dark and filled with crates, according to Cargo Commander. In a galaxy far away from home a bearded man makes a living off scavenging cargo in space, away from everybody else, home, earth, his family. That man is you. With the help of your trusty robotic arm drill, which is also a gun, you will break into containers, jump around, find cargo to bring back, possibly asphyxiate in space, get blown up, drilled alive by space mosquitoes, clawed to death by mutated former colleagues and maybe receive a drawing from your son back home every once in a while. In the grim darkness of Cargo Commander, there is only scavenging.
Visually, the game is boxy 2.5D with a distinct style a bit reminiscent of Borderlands. Models, textures and the like are nothing too impressive, but they fit well together, and the game has great physics as well as effects to compensate. There is something quite magical watching big metal containers break apart to pieces, spewing their contents out and disappearing into the void. There isn't much in the way of graphics options, but there shouldn't be any need to tweak much of those either way, as the game is hardly demanding and should run reasonably on any modern machine.
Where Cargo Commander shines though is the clever way it subverts genre expectations and mashes up features of RPGs, rogue-likes, score attack and others to supplement the core of its gameplay. Each workday starts off with attracting containers to your floating space box of a home. The objective is always the same, get as much cargo as you can and return to your home. It may seem a bit dull at first, but navigating the randomized insides of each container, avoiding mutants or slaughtering them, never feels like you're just going through the motions. You still have to get to your home before a wormhole opens though, and sucks everything except your home container in. Dashing back can be quite frantic as you run through falling debris and often into the void of space. Even when you think you've got the basics down, the game starts introducing new mechanics such as account progression via Cargo Corp ranks given for finding new types of cargo as well as an upgrade system that lasts only for your current play through, if you die or clear the sector and move on, you start from scratch.
There is a story to the game as well, told via in-game e-mails and parcels that you can receive. It's surprisingly well written and touching, being one of the many little things that Cargo Commander does right, and paints the game world as quite a grim place if you think too hard about it. On the same note is the fact that most of the enemies in the game are mutated former cargo commanders, whose caps you use as currency to upgrade your weapons of which you have four; a nailgun, your starting weapon and basic peashooter, a pistol that pierces enemies in a line, acting as a sniper of sorts, a shotgun, and a magnetic bomb launcher. All of them can be upgraded and are pretty decent, but the mag bomb launcher deserves a special mention. You can stick the bombs to any surface, mutants included, and detonate them at will, so it's a very tactical and handy weapon, but usually with scarce ammo. There are a few issues with hit detection and the shooting isn't very precise overall, but it's nothing game-breaking.
There is an alternate game mode as well, which you unlock at rank five (which is about a few hours of gameplay at most). In the so called ‘Journey Mode’ you have no home container and are forced to hop between an endless chain of containers that come and go, albeit at a much slower pace than normal mode's frantic wormholes. It's more relaxed in a way and focused on survival more than anything, but there is still cargo to be gathered and ‘uploaded’ via specific consoles, so you can still compete for score. I personally prefer the normal mode a lot more, but if you want to explore and not have a time limit looming over your head, it's an interesting change of pace.
Multiplayer in the game is implemented in the fashion of a rogue-like, once you die you leave a corpse, your upgrades are gone and your score is submitted. Other players can loot your corpse for caps and ammo, and it serves as a good warning to hazards, since enemies can spawn out of thin air once you pick up a cargo crate. That is probably my biggest gripe with the game; some containers are simply there to make your life hell, and the amount of enemies that can spawn from nowhere at later waves is ridiculous. I feel that this mechanic should be toned down, or at least have it be there once you enter, and not when you pick up cargo and possibly get yourself trapped. It's certainly not enough to condemn the game, but frustrating situations and cheap deaths do happen because of it.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Cargo Commander a lot, and it's truly a hidden gem that sets out to enrich the platformer genre and mostly succeeds. A lot of little details are done right, the random generation of containers means that it's more or less infinitely replayable, and the account progression and competition with others will keep you interested for a fair amount of time.
Where Cargo Commander shines though is the clever way it subverts genre expectations and mashes up features of RPGs, rogue-likes, score attack and others to supplement the core of its gameplay. Each workday starts off with attracting containers to your floating space box of a home. The objective is always the same, get as much cargo as you can and return to your home. It may seem a bit dull at first, but navigating the randomized insides of each container, avoiding mutants or slaughtering them, never feels like you're just going through the motions. You still have to get to your home before a wormhole opens though, and sucks everything except your home container in. Dashing back can be quite frantic as you run through falling debris and often into the void of space. Even when you think you've got the basics down, the game starts introducing new mechanics such as account progression via Cargo Corp ranks given for finding new types of cargo as well as an upgrade system that lasts only for your current play through, if you die or clear the sector and move on, you start from scratch.
There is a story to the game as well, told via in-game e-mails and parcels that you can receive. It's surprisingly well written and touching, being one of the many little things that Cargo Commander does right, and paints the game world as quite a grim place if you think too hard about it. On the same note is the fact that most of the enemies in the game are mutated former cargo commanders, whose caps you use as currency to upgrade your weapons of which you have four; a nailgun, your starting weapon and basic peashooter, a pistol that pierces enemies in a line, acting as a sniper of sorts, a shotgun, and a magnetic bomb launcher. All of them can be upgraded and are pretty decent, but the mag bomb launcher deserves a special mention. You can stick the bombs to any surface, mutants included, and detonate them at will, so it's a very tactical and handy weapon, but usually with scarce ammo. There are a few issues with hit detection and the shooting isn't very precise overall, but it's nothing game-breaking.
There is an alternate game mode as well, which you unlock at rank five (which is about a few hours of gameplay at most). In the so called ‘Journey Mode’ you have no home container and are forced to hop between an endless chain of containers that come and go, albeit at a much slower pace than normal mode's frantic wormholes. It's more relaxed in a way and focused on survival more than anything, but there is still cargo to be gathered and ‘uploaded’ via specific consoles, so you can still compete for score. I personally prefer the normal mode a lot more, but if you want to explore and not have a time limit looming over your head, it's an interesting change of pace.
Multiplayer in the game is implemented in the fashion of a rogue-like, once you die you leave a corpse, your upgrades are gone and your score is submitted. Other players can loot your corpse for caps and ammo, and it serves as a good warning to hazards, since enemies can spawn out of thin air once you pick up a cargo crate. That is probably my biggest gripe with the game; some containers are simply there to make your life hell, and the amount of enemies that can spawn from nowhere at later waves is ridiculous. I feel that this mechanic should be toned down, or at least have it be there once you enter, and not when you pick up cargo and possibly get yourself trapped. It's certainly not enough to condemn the game, but frustrating situations and cheap deaths do happen because of it.
Overall, I enjoyed my time with Cargo Commander a lot, and it's truly a hidden gem that sets out to enrich the platformer genre and mostly succeeds. A lot of little details are done right, the random generation of containers means that it's more or less infinitely replayable, and the account progression and competition with others will keep you interested for a fair amount of time.
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