The streets of King City are suffocating under the boot heel of The Company, and it’s up to the Capes(and you!) to stop it!

Welcome to Capes, the turn-based tactics game based in a world where the supervillains won. This first game from Spitfire Interactive and Deadalic Entertainment is set to release in early May, and brings superheroes to the X-Com style of turn-based tactical action. Clearly a labor of the love of comic books, the game captures a modern day interactive vibe quite well. The devs were kind enough to provide GSC with a code and I was allowed to play the first chapter, which is pretty awesome!! Thanks to the guys at Spitfire and Deadalic for that! Now…onto the preview.

Since bein’ this is my first game preview, am going to stick to a similar structure to my reviews. So let’s start with the Good!

The Good!

First things first, the graphics are actually really impressive for a indie dev working on their first game. Lots of very modern graphics techniques at play here and optimized fairly well for a preview build; the game ran quite well at 1080p and High settings on my i7-3770K/1050TI machine. There’s a decidedly cartoon/comic book visual aesthetic to the world design and visual style, while still retaining the photorealism vibe of most of today’s game engines. Interstitial cutscenes and character bios are presented with hand-drawn characters and limited animation sequences between missions, all really nailing the theme the devs were going for. The writing is a little hit or miss sometimes, but overall, manages to fit right into the campy, over the top and intentionally cliche world of light superhero comics very well. The voice acting, especially for the villains(which is where the money was spent in this regard), is actually quite enjoyable. The villains are suitably over the top and comment on the normal superhero/supervillain tropes of the genre, which makes for some laughs when you encounter them.

Audio design is handled competently. The music is a fun background to the action on screen, and the general sound effects and combat are pretty solid. Maybe not like… Elite Dangerous levels of great sound design, but this does the job quite well. Grounds you in the world well and keeps the action feeling energetic.

Gameplay is where this gets a hair complicated for me. I love turn-based tactics games; have been playing X-Com since I was a kid (and yes, those old games wrecked me as a little kid) and have played many good ones over the years. Capes almost feels like a really cool mobile take on X-Com, though I’m glad it’s a PC game instead. It’s got all the usual trappings of the genre save for a few things simplified out. There’s no familiar “overwatch” action, and I found myself missing it. However, the combination of powers and team-up attacks between the various heroes makes up for the streamlining of some of the other genre-standard mechanics, adding complexity and is truly where the gameplay lives. If you’re not familiar with turn-based tactics, generally you’re going to be handed a set of Action Points to do everything with, with each action costing a certain amount of points. Each character will be able to perform a certain amount of actions per turn. Capes sticks to this pretty well, though it gives you both Movement and Action points in separate pools. Advantages are conferred based on positioning and other factors.

The Weird

Here’s where a review of a game would branch into the Bad & Weird. As fun and straightforward as the game is in the tutorial and first couple of levels, the difficulty ramps up almost too fast. And here’s the note I have for the devs: please note that Normal is not for newcomers to turn based tactics. I am not a newcomer and some of the opening situations the game handed around the 3rd or 4th levels reminded of the old X-Com games where you’d lose 2 soldiers to enemy fire coming off the dropship. Led to more saving/reloading than was actually much fun and eventually turning the difficulty down to easy so I could get through the game in a timely manner(see: without getting really frustrated with it).

The game demands the use of tactical advantages to survive these situations without giving much emphasis to this in the early tutorial blurbs, which are plentiful and informative. And you have to grasp these advantages and use them effectively just to beat the first chapter, especially the final main mission of it. On normal difficulty, this could be a hard deterrent to casual players giving this a shot for the first time. And sure, they can turn it down. but a simple text blurb at the beginning of the game could inform the player better that Normal might be a little overwhelming if they’re new or returning to this kind of game. I wouldn’t call this Bad, more just Weird, as it wasn’t something that put me off the game as a player, but it did frustrate me a little bit more than I would have liked for the kind of vibe the game seems to be going for.

The Bad

This leaves the Bad, which was the levelling system for my heroes. A common feature of these games is levelling up your squadmates between missions and adding abilities and skills to them, and this game definitely has a good skill tree and plenty of new skills and abilities to open up for your growing superteam as time goes on. However, there’s an issue with it: the game gives you lots of SP(Skill Points) per mission provided you do all the bonus objectives, which vary in difficulty.

It does not give much XP per mission though, leading to characters levelling up slowly. So slow as to feel… not very rewarding actually. And when you finish a mission, see a big pile of SP and think “Oh, cool! I’m gonna get some new skills!”, and your dreams are dashed because each skill costs nearly all of the “pile of SP” that you mistakenly thought was a lot…well, it’s just not a great feeling and deflated the sense of risk vs reward for putting in the extra effort to get all that SP in the first place. For a game presenting a power fantasy of playing as superheroes, it was being remarkably stingy about letting me enjoy that power fantasy by opening up new powers for my characters. As a gamer, my thoughts to the devs on this would be to make skills cost a little less SP so we can get maybe 2 or 3 per mission instead of maybe one if we do all the extra work. Doing extra credit work should feel rewarding, hey?

Overall

All that being said, Capes made me laugh several times and the story+gameplay was engaging enough that I’m looking forward to the full release of the game and playing through the rest of it! I see a lot of love in the way this game was put together and it’s an impressive first effort from what seems to be a very small team. Am personally very excited to see what else these folks have in store for us with this game and future IP!

So strap on your Cape, figure out your superhero name, and let’s get ready to take back King City!

Capes releases May 29th for Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5, Steam and Nintendo Switch. Check out the release date trailer below.