Kapture – Does this XBOX Indie Blade Shooter Hit its Mark?

Developer: CandelaCreations
Genre: Shooter
Players: 1-2
Countries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, United States
Languages: English
Price: 80 Points

Developers Summary:

Enroll as an agent to capture the one who has plagued our nation. Intensive training, aerial combats, ground battles and a car chase for a plethora of medals, glory and recognition in this action adventure. Find it tough? Enroll an accomplice and play as a team! Aim for 20 medals and 5 stars and build up an impressive profile.

What We Think:

I’ll say this first: Kapture is one of the more ambitious games I’ve played on the Indie blade. It involves flying an aircraft into enemy territory, storming into an enemy base on foot, and basically closing in on an enemy warlord regardless of what it takes. It sounds like it could hit all the right buttons for those craving a decent side-scrolling shooter.  Does it deliver the goods?

The training at the outset of the game will take you through a quick crash course of all of these elements before launching you into your mission proper. Aerial assault, ground assault and finding cover, driving and grenade throwing are all covered. Then, your briefing maps out that fine points of the mission.  The evil warlord Ozhaka has done it again.  What exactly he has repeated is not revealed, but I just assumed it was pretty bad.  You will fly in, engaging aerial defenses until you can safely land, you will fight troops on the ground, the warlord will escape (this is already known?), at which point you will drive after the boss who is attempting to escape in a car. You are told all of this before the mission even begins. It’s a tried-and-true plot structure, but having it all mapped out essentially derails any level of suspense that might have built as the game is played.

The controls throughout all parts of the game are exasperating. In the aerial assault missions, your plane can stop on a dime, hovering up and down on the screen (or east or west?). I would advise hugging the top of the screen, as flying down seems to be faster than flying up.  If you have to ascend to fight an enemy, expect to be peppered with bullets until you can fire off a round at him.  Enemy planes also seem as if they are hovering, and regardless of your speed, the rate at which the distance between you closes doesn’t change.  If you get to close to a plane, it will start turning the aircraft equivalent of cartwheels.  I’m sure it was meant to be a evasive tactic, and though it does make them harder to hit, it looks pretty silly.  Many of of the enemy anti-aircraft structures are colored in a way that matches the backdrop, which makes locating them difficult. You’ll have to wait until they shoot to determine where they are before firing back. Opening up a semi-automatic can of whoop-ass is inadvisable, as you have a limited stock of ammo. I would recommend a conservative play-through, but taking too much time will result in your plane running out of fuel.

The ground battles use a similar control mechanic, although you now control a soldier through a top-down view of the battlefield. You need to scroll right, moving up and down, and grabbing cover to avoid enemy fire. I found it frustrating that the up-and-down controls were on an axis pivot. In many cases, I’d try to move out of the way of enemy fire, only to find that the axis had planted me in the middle of a pile of sandbags. If this should happen (and it happened to me more than once), you can wiggle up and down to free yourself, but I think this is more a case of poor collision detection than a design choice.

Once you’ve cleared Ground Battle A, you’ll be running through Ground Battle B, which looks almost identical, save for the appearance of what appear to be heat-seeking grenades (thrown from off-screen by the warlord). They will fly in physics-defying patterns to find you, and getting out of the way of one requires as much luck as it does skill.  Getting hit by one of the projectiles will decimate your health bar, and being hit by two in a round will easily end your soldier’s life, sending him back to the very beginning of the stage to start again.

After these stages are cleared, the warlord hops in his car and drives off, and you must give chase in a top-down view of the roads that lead to the docks, where an escape chopper awaits. This chapter was easily the most flawed part of the game. The road looks as if someone held up two arm lengths of ribbon by one end, and let it drop. There are roads that do nothing but run into each other, roads that go nowhere at all and there is only one that leads to the docks. Running off the road even once will result in a crippling loss of speed, after which, it’s almost guaranteed that the warlord will escape unfettered. Want to try again?  Too bad. Once you reach this stage of the game, you either apprehend your target or you don’t.  There are no continues, and if he gets away, the only way to try again is to play through the entire game another time.

The weapon stores that appear between levels are a nice touch. You’re going to want to buy ammo, and switching weapons will add some variety to the ground assault missions. There are awards to be gained, so perfectionists way want to take more than one run at it. With the controls as they are, any difficulty setting above Easy is going to make for a very long, frustrating play-through.

Ultimately, Kapture is a lofty attempt at a multi-faceted shooter game that unfortunately falls short. That said, it costs a mere 80 Microsoft Points.

Rating:  

Kapture available at the Indie Game section of the Xbox Live Game Marketplace.

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