REVIEW: Capes will challenge your wits and morals

The Nintendo Switch has been home to great turn-based strategy games like Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and XCOM. Joining these giants is Capes, a fantastic game with a gritty story that will keep you glued to your screen not only due to its smart and addictive gameplay, but through its unexpectedly deep and contemporary narrative.

Capes’ story unfolds in King City, a place where heroes used to be admired. Nowadays, King City is controlled by the Company, and anyone with superpowers is labelled a criminal ripe for hunting. Doctrine, a superhero that was alive twenty years ago when the downfall happened, is now recruiting a group of young superheroes to take back control of the city.

Capes’ plot offers a lot of social critique and deconstructs the superhero genre in many ways. There are very likeable characters along with some who are completely despicable. Nonetheless, most of the cast are quite complex and react to various scenarios in believable ways. In fact, the game will make you question your morals and leave a long-lasting impact, as you’ll forever analyze how you would have reacted in similar circumstances. Even more, while I disagree with many choices by some characters, especially towards the end, I can appreciate how well-written those decisions were, having a buildup throughout the game’s many missions.

The mission variety in Capes is yet another strong point. Unlike some tactical games where the only goal is to defeat the opposing forces, here you may be protecting hostages, deactivating devices, leading a civilian to an exit, or stealthy infiltrating a facility. The diversity of missions keeps the game fresh and so do the different powers each hero has.

You will command a team of eight heroes, and although it takes a while to gather them all, once you have a full roster, the ways to approach any challenge are manifold. Most missions allow you to take four heroes, and only a few of those have ‘mandatory’ members, so you have plenty of freedom in your team composition.

Will you hit-and-run with Rebound’s teleportation or face challenges head-on with Facet’s defensive abilities? Will you throw enemies off of buildings or cause chip damage by playing carefully? Every player will have a very different experience and the developers deserve a lot of praise for crafting such interesting and fun characters and abilities. In fact, one big detail that makes Capes stand out from the crowd are Team-up Abilities.

If two characters are close to each other, they will gain a slightly modified version of one of their abilities. An attack may be stronger, push an enemy back, or even disarm it. Playing around with these effects was extremely fun and in many occasions I added a character to my team only because of the team-up ability they would bring to the table. You will need to plan ahead in order to use such attacks, so this feature adds a level of strategy to the gameplay.

Another unique quality of every hero is their Ultimate. By charging your Ultimate bar, you can unleash a very powerful move that will change the tide of battle. Similar to CO Powers in Advance Wars, they vary from stopping enemies in their tracks or performing multiple attacks in one turn to fully healing your character. Unlike Advance Wars though, every hero gains charge in a different way, ranging from receiving damage or performing backstabs to causing damage or absorbing fire. Both types of abilities were game-changers and helped me in the most difficult challenges.

Speaking of difficulty, the game can be very hard if you want and I love that. For those who want to experience the engaging story or who are not very experienced in strategy games, normal or easy difficulty are available, and they still present a decent challenge. However, for hardcore fans of the genre such as myself, the hardest difficulty was just perfect: heroes have less health, enemies can hit harder, and you get a game over if any hero dies.

Equally important is the fact that Capes respects your time, so if you get a game over (and you will), you can reload a quick-save or a checkpoint. The latter occurs at key moments of the mission, like completing an objective or lowering the health of a boss to a certain level. In fact, quick-saving often was key in beating stages and completing Optional Objectives.

I aimed to complete every optional objective in my first try (and succeeded!), but as the name implies, you don’t need to. These optional objectives just increase the difficulty and grant you SP. You use SP to upgrade your abilities, but you can also obtain it by fulfilling Challenges, which are unique goals for each character, such as using an ability a number of times or defeating a certain amount of enemies. You will complete Challenges through normal gameplay without the need to grind for it, and you will finish with more SP than you require, so there is no need to worry about optional objectives if you don’t want to.

The game allows for some customization in terms of which colors represent your team and the enemies, which is a great feature for color-blind people. Also, you can restrict blood and profanity, which I did. While I appreciate that option, the game ends up bleeping swear words, and that got annoying very quickly. Characters use profane words extremely often, sometimes unnecessarily, and I would have preferred a ‘clean’ version instead of censoring, but I do understand that it would have been very costly to re-record so much dialogue. That point aside, almost all of the story has voice acting, and it is quite good for the most part.

The art direction is great and the character portraits go for a comic-book aesthetic, which I really like. The transition to 3D models is not that great, but it does its job. The maps are varied with nice details, and even when there is a little bit of stuttering, it does not affect the gameplay. I did find that one type of Challenge is glitched out in Hardcore mode (finishing a mission with full health), but the developers are aware and have promised a fix. Lastly, music is pretty much non-existent, but sound effects are very fitting.

An extremely fun and challenging strategy game complemented with a thought-provoking story, Capes is a great option for any Fire Emblem or Advance Wars fan. Although it is not without flaws, the addictive gameplay of choosing the best team for each map and chess-like battles where planning ahead is paramount will completely satisfy when you win every hard-fought encounter.