Knitted Kitten Jumpers

Cargo Commander

The working man.

Day after day of mindless toil. Pushing things this way and that. An extension of the machine in front of you. You carry out the instructions that were given to you in a time long past, for reasons which you can't fully remember, for a purpose which is forgotten.

In another part of the galaxy, the Bourgeois revel in the ultimate fruit of your work whilst all you see is a few small coins which serve to keep your many screaming children off the streets and in a state of adequate sustenance. Silver, rat-eaten donuts and knitted jumpers with pictures of kittens on them - the building blocks of an empire.

But you tolerate the work, because you get to do it in the middle of space, in a ship equipped with a huge electromagnet, and your right arm is augmented with a massive industrial drill that can also function as a nailgun.

Good times indeed.

We are introduced to the game with minimal exposition, this Cargo Commander operating out in his spaceship in the middle of some sector somewhere, floating amongst a load of space junk. Controls are really simple and intuitive, W, A, and D to move left, right and jump, with E to activate things (like the ships giant magnet).

Left click shoots, and right click either thrusts out a large box-breaking hammer-like protrusion from your mechanical arm, or if you are next to a destructable wall, you can use a drill to break through it with a bit of a concerted effort. And another thing that is made very clear to us from the start is that this man has a beard. It is neatly combed. It's probably very useful to help resist the cold of space.

A tutorial level eases us in to the game, where we learn about the basics of moving our man through the big cargo boxes that smash in to our craft after the operation of the magnet. We shoot some enemies, collect new guns, and pick up some cargo.

Each cargo box is procedurally generated and operates like a platformer, with relative gravity and the position of walls and floors different every time. You can drill a hole in the wall of a box and eject your good self out in to space, where you swim in a zero gravity environment to get back to somewhere safe (and you have as long as you can hold your breath to get there).

After a time, wormholes appear which serve to suck the large cargo boxes back in to some kind of oblivion - which is the cue to get the hell out of that particular box. It doesn't make any sense, but I don't really care.

And we repeat these tasks during our work day, attracting boxes to smash in to our ship (these boxes also get magnetised, attracting further boxes which can act like a sequence of levels). We plunder these for goods and return to our ship to take stock. Once we have enough cargo in a given work day, we get a chance to explore a kind of 'boss' box, where if we are lucky, we will find a pass to go to another sector.

The game is a lot of fun, and has a great character. It's clearly not meant to be an accurate portrayal of life in space, with the constantly appearing wormholes and the apparently arbitrary approach to how gravity works. All this serves to build a slightly daft game world forming the veneer to all the clever gameplay mechanics decisions.

It leans heavily towards the Arcade side of the Roguelike spectrum, and if you like your gaming experience to be cerebral and slow-paced, you may not appreciate the twitchy platformer mechanics and the constant time pressure of the wormholes limiting your presence within each procedurally generated container. It certainly feels a bit too fast-paced for my jaded mind and I can't play it for too long without worrying a little bit that I might go in to some unwanted state of increased excitement.

To add further to the arcade elements, high scores are kept online for each sector, so it's great if you want to compete with the world.

It's original, amusing, interesting and full of great visual and gameplay design elements - all sitting within a relatively simple, coherent and unpretentious wrapper. If you like this sort of thing, I would definitely recommend picking up a copy and giving it some playtime.

http://playcargocommander.com - Visit the Website!