LocoCycle (4 DVD)
Who could have imagined that a game featuring so much ridiculousness could be boring?
Well,
it's not all boring, though most of the fun comes not from the act of
playing LocoCycle, but from watching it. Clever live-action cutscenes
introduce you to Iris, Pablo, and a variety of other kooky characters,
laying out the events that lead to a motorized battle machine dragging a
Spanish-speaking mechanic down the open road. These wacky scenes had me
laughing out loud frequently, especially during the first 30 minutes.
Iris' translation functions are fried early on, so she constantly
misinterprets Pablo's cries to be set free as encouragement, and she
lets loose hysterical one-liners proving her single-minded focus.
"Pablo, do you think in Scottsburg, Indiana, that the streets are paved
with flags?" she drones. "I hear that freedom rides an eagle, which
rides a motorcycle." Elsewhere, the references fly fast and furious,
with Iris dropping quotes from Top Gun, Back to the Future, and Allstate insurance commercials. (Though I wouldn't argue that Pablo is, in fact, in good hands.)
The
giggles flow freely when the evil motorcycle called Spike picks up his
own happy-go-lucky human companion. While Pablo routinely begs Iris for
sweet release, Spike's jocular friend keeps a grin firmly plastered on
her face. She happily sips iced tea as Spike pulls her down the open
road, and the strange situations that duo finds itself in are great
sources of chuckles. As for Iris and Pablo, Pablo's dialogue is all in
Spanish, with subtitles splashed across the bottom of the screen, even
during gameplay. At first I was annoyed that I had to keep taking my
eyes off the action so I could read Pablo's dialogue. But in time, you
realize that Pablo has absolutely nothing to add, and that you can
safely overlook his repetitive pleas, just like Iris does. And truth be
told, the game's biggest joke--having Iris pulling Pablo down highways
and across rivers--is stretched thin by the time you reach the end after
about two hours of play.
LocoCycle has no sense of when enough is enough.
Typically,
you drive down the road as you might in a driving game, though there is
no danger of crashing into guardrails and dying a fiery death; the game
just nudges you back on track as an on-rails shooter does. You usually
take down the vehicles and robots that hound you in one of two ways:
either by shooting them from behind with your unspectacular guns or by
mashing buttons in similarly unspectacular hand-to-hand combat. Or would
that be bumper-to-bumper? In any case, the cartoonish cars and trucks
that speed in front of you erupt in sparks as you fire at them, but the
shooting sequences suffer from sameness and are kept separate from the
melee sections. More importantly, there is absolutely no sense of
danger, and thus no tension instilled. LocoCycle is the easiest game I
have played in quite some time. There is little need to swerve around
traffic, and there are no nail-biting shootouts between you and your
enemies. The gameplay is a mechanism for delivering jokes, not for
delivering interactive fun.
The
close-quarters combat also suffers from a major dose of shallowness. At
first, these sections prove to be a visual delight. Iris leaps into the
air and pummels flying combatants in jetpacks with her tires and
chassis, occasionally tossing poor Pablo around like a spinning top.
(That's gotta hurt.) But once the craziness of the concept wears off,
you're left with a simplistic combat system that only requires you to
hammer on the same two buttons over and over, occasionally hitting
another button to counter an attack. These battles are so easy that I
don't think I missed an entire counter in the game, and I racked up
enormous combo scores without breaking a sweat. The whole idea of combo
scores in this game is silly, actually, given how aimless mashing makes
you an instant LocoCycle expert. You earn points to unlock passive
benefits, but I'd unlocked them all before I even hit the final stage,
and none of them meaningfully deepened the gameplay. Its roads may be
bumpy, but LocoCycle feels oddly flat from beginning to end.
LocoCycle
does try to diversify, but most ideas wear out their welcome before the
game moves to the next one. Side-view boss battles are fun diversions
at first, but the bosses repeat the same few attacks over and over
again, and possess so much health that it takes seemingly forever to
bring them down. A top-down vertical shooting sequence is a nice change
of pace for two waves, but it, too, fails to rise above the most basic
ideas. By the time I hit the third wave, I was bored. By the time the
fourth wave arrived, I was actively annoyed. LocoCycle has no sense of
when enough is enough, and as a result, too many of these detours feel
like padding as opposed to creative variations.
"I hear that freedom rides an eagle, which rides a motorcycle."
Luckily,
LocoCycle comes into its own in its final 20 minutes. I don't want to
give away too much of the final chapter, since you have to see it to
believe it. Let's just say that LocoCycle takes on the guise of a pure
rail shooter, filling the screen with explosions and big robots, and
using live recorded footage in its background to keep you gawking. And
even before that, the game finds its way to a faster tempo. The
quick-time events are accompanied by crazy scenes that remind me of
2009's Ninja Blade
in all their dramatic insanity. You dodge falling boulders and
careening school buses, evade Spike's frightening chained wheels, skim
under semi trucks, and hang perilously from speeding helicopters.
There's also a joyous minigame that has Iris flinging Pablo forward like
a saw blade and spinning through legions of oncoming agents riding
hoverbikes and surfing missiles.
I loved seeing
LocoCycle through to its zany finale, because I enjoyed the jokes and
Iris' robotic line delivery, and because I loved seeing the characters
get themselves into silly situations. This would have been a great short
comic film. But LocoCycle is a game, and in an unexpected twist of
fate, it makes the act of catching rockets, fighting soaring robots, and
rushing through the rural fields outside of Scottsburg, Indiana,
blander than they deserve to be.