Capes Review – IGN

Plenty of amusingly cheesy superhero humor is thrown around – including a lot of references to Primax’s self-driving cars being death traps – but the story is also often dark, with plenty of straight-up murders and blood splashed in the streets as the villains hunt down supers and slaughter anyone in their way. There’s a fair amount of debate over whether heroes should kill, though all the while it sure seems like we’re killing a bunch of dudes by knocking them off of buildings or exploding them with fireballs, and the way it ends seems to hand-wave a lot of that moral ambiguity away. But as excuses to have superheroes beat up bad guys go, this ain’t bad.

That said, it’s very strange that while most of the story is delivered between missions with a 2D animated comic book style where characters’ lips don’t move, sometimes it will randomly switch to conversations between characters using their in-game 3D models. That works well enough, but it’s a confusing inconsistency. There’s also an annoying glitch where the frame rate regularly chugs as the camera zooms out from a cinematic, which is odd for a game that isn’t trying to be terribly ambitious with its graphics.

Even though animations aren’t always its strong suit, they successfully make this group feel like a team and bring energy to the turn-based action. One of Capes’ best ideas is that your squad of four heroes work together to enhance each others’ abilities when they’re close enough. It’s not unlike the team-up system in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but here it’s much more based on position and they work differently based on which two heroes are collaborating. Among many other team-ups, the speedster Mercurial can leave a trail of fire behind her as she zips from next to Ignis to the other side of the map; Weathervane’s lightning storm is vastly more powerful with Kinetic nearby to supercharge its damage; and Mindfire can telepathically make an enemy turn around so that Rebound can teleport in for a backstab with bonus damage. It makes the choice of which four team members to bring to a fight hugely important – though it doesn’t cost you anything to restart the mission with a different squad if you find yourself in need of, say, damage mitigation from Facet’s crystal armor. You also have to keep your team’s position in mind, because if they stray more than a few tiles apart they won’t be able to take advantage of their team-up abilities.

Capes is very smart about layering on mechanics to think about beyond simply punching or zapping an enemy for as much damage as possible. Some attacks do disarm damage, which doesn’t necessarily reduce their health but can force a thug to drop a gun or bat, or interrupt a more powerful enemy’s super attack that they’re charging up for next turn. On top of that, each hero has an ultimate ability – such as nerdy scientist Hyde transforming into a big stompy swarm of nanobots – but they all charge up differently. Facet charges as he absorbs damage while armored, Mindfire earns his by making an enemy vulnerable and then dealing damage to it, and Ignis slurps up fire around the map like Pac-Man. Because of that, swapping out a single member of your team can pretty radically change your priorities in clever ways.

Once you get the hang of it and are reliably beating down bad guys, you can test your skills by attempting to complete each mission’s list of optional objectives. In addition to completing the main objective without a hero being downed (they can be revived with half their health), you’ll be challenged with pushing some number of enemies off ledges, disarming them, or using specific abilities, among other things. This is the main way you earn skill points to upgrade your heroes’ powers – some of which are minor half-point damage or range increases, but others unlock whole new extremely handy skills – so it’s definitely worth revisiting missions in the Simulator to mop them up, especially if you were that close to pulling off a perfect run.

However, the one type of mission I have no desire to revisit are the stealth ones, which are often obnoxious exercises in trial and error. While you can preview exactly where an enemy will patrol on their next turn and tiles they can currently see are highlighted, their gaze sweeps over the map as they walk and turn, and it can be very tricky to figure out where you’ll be safely hidden. I also had instances where I was detected despite not appearing to be in an enemy’s sight at all, and though there might be a reason for that, it wasn’t clear. That’s no fun, but the saving grace is that the quick-save button makes reloading painless, and several of the stealth missions are optional anyway.