It’s probably the funniest joke in Capes – which has a lot of pretty good superhero jokes – that not one of your eight playable characters actually wears a cape. This clever and challenging turn-based tactical game does wear its heart on its sleeve, though, and a clear love of the comics that inspired it comes across as it makes its underdog vigilante squad feel powerful with creative combo mechanics. It’s a style of battle that gives you almost all the information and lets you execute a surefire plan in a way that reminds me of Into the Breach more than it does XCOM.
Every level is a tactical puzzle that tells you almost everything that’s going to happen next turn up front, and winning is all about countering the enemy’s moves before they can damage you by either taking them down, disarming them, or moving them right where you want them. Only a handful of abilities have randomized effects and there’s no chance to miss, plus you can see any enemy’s abilities and a timeline of who will get to move next. In short, you have all the information you need to succeed. I do wish it went a little further and told us specifically which target an enemy plans to attack and with what to take the last of the guesswork out of figuring out how best to thwart them, but once you understand that they’ll always go after the closest target (unless otherwise specified), it’s rare that you’ll be surprised by how a turn plays out if you’ve taken the time to read the room. Sometimes that can take a minute when there are literally 25 characters in the turn order list and you have to go through each one every turn to make certain your almost-dead character isn’t in the line of fire.
Capes’ tongue-in-cheek story grew on me fairly quickly – and when I heard that Morgan Jaffit, a writer who’d worked on the excellent Freedom Force games was involved, it made perfect sense. Sure, we’ve seen about 300 off-brand versions of the iconic Marvel and DC heroes at this point (everything from The Boys to Invincible to Watchmen has their own set of characters inspired by the classics), but it’s fun to embody the “I understood that reference” Captain America meme as Capes rolls out its parade of eight heroes that pay homage to the likes of Nightcrawler, Colossus, Storm, Quicksilver, Professor X, The Hulk, Human Torch, and… I dunno, someone who punches a lot? I wouldn’t say any of them are terrifically memorable on their own, but they hold their own well enough and only Ignis, the fired-up influencer parody, gets annoying to listen to at times.
The triumvirate of supervillains who rule over King City are entertaining megalomaniacs, and they come with creative boss fight mechanics. The Joker-ish telepath Wildstar can mess with your heroes’ heads and make them miss their first attack on him, while anti-Tony Stark Primax is completely invulnerable and has to be avoided and worked around as you achieve other objectives, rather than fight her directly. Those boss battles – and a strong variety of enemies and minibosses with tons of different abilities – keep fights interesting and diverse over what turns out to be a pretty lengthy campaign. I extended my time with it by replaying some missions to perfect them and earn more skill points, and there were a couple of very tough ones that took me a lot of tries to squeak through, but it was around 40 hours before I saw the end.
Plenty of amusingly cheesy superhero humor is thrown around – including a lot of references to Primax’s self-driving cars being death traps – but the story is also often dark, with plenty of straight-up murders and blood splashed in the streets as the villains hunt down supers and slaughter anyone in their way. There’s a fair amount of debate over whether heroes should kill, though all the while it sure seems like we’re killing a bunch of dudes by knocking them off of buildings or exploding them with fireballs, and the way it ends seems to hand-wave a lot of that moral ambiguity away. But as excuses to have superheroes beat up bad guys go, this ain’t bad.
That said, it’s very strange that while most of the story is delivered between missions with a 2D animated comic book style where characters’ lips don’t move, sometimes it will randomly switch to conversations between characters using their in-game 3D models. That works well enough, but it’s a confusing inconsistency. There’s also an annoying glitch where the frame rate regularly chugs as the camera zooms out from a cinematic, which is odd for a game that isn’t trying to be terribly ambitious with its graphics.
Even though animations aren’t always its strong suit, they successfully make this group feel like a team and bring energy to the turn-based action. One of Capes’ best ideas is that your squad of four heroes work together to enhance each others’ abilities when they’re close enough. It’s not unlike the team-up system in Marvel’s Midnight Suns, but here it’s much more based on position and they work differently based on which two heroes are collaborating. Among many other team-ups, the speedster Mercurial can leave a trail of fire behind her as she zips from next to Ignis to the other side of the map; Weathervane’s lightning storm is vastly more powerful with Kinetic nearby to supercharge its damage; and Mindfire can telepathically make an enemy turn around so that Rebound can teleport in for a backstab with bonus damage. It makes the choice of which four team members to bring to a fight hugely important – though it doesn’t cost you anything to restart the mission with a different squad if you find yourself in need of, say, damage mitigation from Facet’s crystal armor. You also have to keep your team’s position in mind, because if they stray more than a few tiles apart they won’t be able to take advantage of their team-up abilities.
Capes is very smart about layering on mechanics to think about beyond simply punching or zapping an enemy for as much damage as possible. Some attacks do disarm damage, which doesn’t necessarily reduce their health but can force a thug to drop a gun or bat, or interrupt a more powerful enemy’s super attack that they’re charging up for next turn. On top of that, each hero has an ultimate ability – such as nerdy scientist Hyde transforming into a big stompy swarm of nanobots – but they all charge up differently. Facet charges as he absorbs damage while armored, Mindfire earns his by making an enemy vulnerable and then dealing damage to it, and Ignis slurps up fire around the map like Pac-Man. Because of that, swapping out a single member of your team can pretty radically change your priorities in clever ways.
Once you get the hang of it and are reliably beating down bad guys, you can test your skills by attempting to complete each mission’s list of optional objectives. In addition to completing the main objective without a hero being downed (they can be revived with half their health), you’ll be challenged with pushing some number of enemies off ledges, disarming them, or using specific abilities, among other things. This is the main way you earn skill points to upgrade your heroes’ powers – some of which are minor half-point damage or range increases, but others unlock whole new extremely handy skills – so it’s definitely worth revisiting missions in the Simulator to mop them up, especially if you were that close to pulling off a perfect run.
However, the one type of mission I have no desire to revisit are the stealth ones, which are often obnoxious exercises in trial and error. While you can preview exactly where an enemy will patrol on their next turn and tiles they can currently see are highlighted, their gaze sweeps over the map as they walk and turn, and it can be very tricky to figure out where you’ll be safely hidden. I also had instances where I was detected despite not appearing to be in an enemy’s sight at all, and though there might be a reason for that, it wasn’t clear. That’s no fun, but the saving grace is that the quick-save button makes reloading painless, and several of the stealth missions are optional anyway.
