Capes Review

Brisbane indie studio Spitfire Interactive’s debut title Capes is a straightforward pitch that grabbed my interest due to its faint resemblance to Irrational Games’ classic superhero strategy title Freedom Force. Capes’ title is an ironic pitch for the story it tells of cape-less, street-level superheroes fighting an authoritarian regime that has successfully kept do-gooders under its thumb. Players will oversee the latest rebel faction of amateur heroes to rise against the oppressive Company and liberate King City. Missions play out similarly to XCOM Chimera Squad, taking a handful of your modest roster out on objective-driven, turn-based combat missions in relatively small arenas. Each playable hero is unique and pairing them together effectively for the mission’s demands will be key to success. 

Capes is structured around a collection of precisely tuned and challenging missions featuring grid-based movement and an emphasis on turn order. Heroes typically have the benefit of going first and setting themselves up against the stacked odds of many foes with guns and abilities of their own. There’s also the occasional stealth mission sprinkled in to test players’ skills of chess-like foresight, factoring enemy patrol routes into your placement of heroes and obfuscation of walls and barriers. 

Though the locations of these scenarios are generic rooftops, back alleys, and otherwise empty industrial spaces that don’t have much character, there is a surprising amount of detail and artistry in the background environments. The relative blandness of the combat spaces is forgivable though, as these areas benefit from being readable and thoughtfully laid out to accommodate a dynamic space that transforms this game’s combat puzzle.

Using your powers to wall off the small stages is an effective strategy

In place of the compelling risk/reward proposition of chance in attempting to execute actions or deal damage effectively, Capes instead wants to be a knowable and deterministic puzzle. The game teaches that enemy AI should behave predictably in given conditions, with players encouraged to leverage this understanding in exploiting them. During the first half of the game, this leads to the satisfaction of overcoming great forces of foes by successfully interrupting the biggest threats and eliminating whoever is coming up soonest on the turn order. The turn-based puzzle requires that the player always assess the hazard of every individual enemy on every single turn. By the second act, missions afford a considerably higher challenge, and your heroes will feel lucky to make it out with even a sole survivor standing. 

Until a point in the latter half of Capes, this game presents a fair and increasing difficulty curve that is in keeping with the player’s expected mastery of the straightforward, turn-based systems. If you didn’t do well, you’re encouraged to go back and try for a cleaner run by knocking off challenges such as not having any heroes get knocked out or using a particular skill a minimum number of times. These challenges are the only effective way to unlock skills that upgrade your heroes’ existing abilities and unlock additional ones. Mastery is rewarded with more adept heroes, meaning that grinding is all but absent, and skill is king.

Unlike other deterministic tactical combat puzzlers that don’t have any randomisation with any of the actions that the player can execute, Capes misses a trick by not allowing the player to map their moves or roll back their actions during a hero’s turn. Into The Breach allowed you to plot and move your units, rolling back actions you’ve reconsidered. That is, until you pass over to let the AI take its turn. Too often in Capes, I would move a hero to set up for an attack, realise it was suboptimal or that I clicked the wrong tile because it was on a raised surface, only to find the movement points were now spent and I was locked into a bad play. In the latter half of the game, a single bad move like this can snowball into a failed mission. Because there is no rollback functionality and only a single save state, Capes eventually hits a point where it becomes incredibly unforgiving. A single minor mistake in a mission with dozens of enemies taking turns after your own can all too easily leave the player uncertain of when to give up and restart as missions become less about solving a tactical puzzle and more about trial and error. As a hero takes a wallop in the first of three stages of a later mission, I spent the remaining 30-plus minutes anticipating an inevitable game over state, fearful and unsure of when to call it quits and restart the mission.

Defending against brainwashed civilians is an interesting and tough-as-nails scenario

The last five or so campaign missions will see players facing odds of as many as 15 enemies at a time, sometimes more, across multiple waves with absolutely no room for respite or mistakes. With only four rather mortal heroes per mission, each with two actions per turn, players are expected to watch over a dozen enemy actions react to their tentative teething out of the mission arena. When the odds are always so stacked against the player in terms of enemy numbers in the face of a meagre action economy, these later missions are variations on the single trick of putting you in a further compromised, overwhelmed state with no way of rolling back. The player simply cannot make any of the confident risks or interesting decisions of earlier missions without the very real fear of restarting a lengthy sortie. 

Much time here has been spent on the combat scenarios which make up probably over 80% of this game. There’s also a bit of hero banter amongst our Capes squad and some hero backstories. The writing is as easily digestible as your average superpowered Saturday morning cartoon. Yet, this is also a gory title with a tasteful smattering of f-bombs. Taken as a whole, the thin characters and tropey writing are perfectly in sync with the overall theme and feel of this game. The story however moves in such broad, casual strokes as to not remain in the mind for very long, with any movement in the plot being mostly relegated to the exposition of shadowy characters in the in-engine cutscenes and 2D talking heads scenes bookending missions.

There’s a lot of writing for the fresh, diverse cast. It’s not especially memorable, though

Dialogue among the Capes crew hints at the motivations of our rebel heroes and the wider state of goings on with the Company and King City, but it is mostly told through stilted exchanges that are so pastiche in the superhero saturation of 2024 that nothing here will likely keep players hooked to the credits. The characters are also strictly one-note. Albeit appropriately voiced for the cheesy, mid-2000s tone, our small cast of characters possesses a single trait each that often boils down to being overly sarcastic, sincere, or neurotic. They also present as ethnically, sexually, and (possibly) neuro-diverse and lend positively to this title’s identity. However, everything about the story and characters feels functional and efficient at best. Nobody will be talking about this rag-tag bunch and their hard-won victories once the credits roll.

Final Thoughts

Capes makes a great first impression as an original superhero tactics title that feels fresh, tight, and responsive. The turn-based battle system controls well and is easy to pick up, while also being so confident in its smooth player induction that things quickly start getting spicy. The roster of cape-less heroes all look, sound, and play satisfyingly distinct from one another and make choosing your four heroes for a given mission a daunting task. Players who like their turn-based XCOM-like titles to be lean, mean, and brain-meltingly precise will be sucked in for the first six-to-nine hours. After that, the tactical puzzles give way to what are essentially trial-and-error horde-survival missions that betray this title’s ambitions of doing anything interesting with the systems or story.

Reviewed on PC // Review code supplied by publisher

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