Serious Brew's "Cargo Commander" is a mix of semi procedural platforming and a collectathon. I grabbed it in a bundle of titles just to have a greater variety of games to play.

It does a number of things I really like, but the few quirks it has that annoy me, really don't make me want to play it for long.

You player as a worker guy. A fat coffee drinking man 20 who is light years out in space tasked with collecting cargo off derelict containers. There's hints that your wife does not know what you are actually doing and the usual corporation corruption keeping you out here.

The few bits of story are read through emails accessible on a computer in your home base. A lot of it is meta-commentary on how to play the game and justification for why things happen. But it also updates you as you rise through the ranks as a cargo commander.
There's not a lot, at least in as much as I played of the game, but there are hints there is stuff tho be found over the later levels.

Each day, you activate a giant magnet that attracts cargo containers for you to explore. There's a time limit as a wormhole will inevitably appear and start to suck everything up, including yourself if you dilly-dally too long. Should you die, robo-droids will find your corpse and bring you back to life, so that you can continue your existence as a worker guy slave and find more cargo.

Cargo is made of glowing blue '?' blocks, destroying them gives you loot that you need to unlock to further the game. The type of loot is determined by sector, a set of containers that reset each time you die or attempt a run of the game (called 'days'). At any point you can rest and store the progress, but the sector sequence will be the same each day until you move to a new one.

To make your way through the game, you are given a set of objectives per sector. Aside from the tutorial, this basically boils down to 'find the sector container'. These are bring green blocks, protected by a stronger boss monster. Returning this to home allows you to unlock a sector from a list, or create a name of your own and share it out.

Each time you activate a magnet, you attract a number of cargo containers. They'll hit your home base in a chain allowing you to move from one to the other. If you are in the base or a most containers you are affected by gravity to the 'floor'. Since each container's floor can be in a different direction this runs the risk of the camera/guy not rotating fast enough to spin around and instead you are spun back into the previous container.

Thankfully you have a drill and can open various plated walls. They're not all destructible, but you can exit your base, go to a different wall and drill in to get to areas not directly accessible. This also has the benefit of tricking enemies to jump-attack towards you and drift off into space rather than having to engage in combat. It's not that easy to pull off but is easier than combat directly.

And combat is my real gripe of the game. It is not bad in itself, but you have such a small and limited supply of ammo with the nailgun and blaster, and your smash/drill attack does not always knockback monsters that it is really easy to get stuck and be killed. Or worse, run out of ammo and not be able to realistically engage in battle.

This is hugely detrimental to the game. It really needs to give you more 'bullets' to shoot at things as the possibility of running out in a round is incredibly easy that it encourages you to try stupid things to not waste the ammo you have.

While enemies respawn from crystals, you can destroy the crystal with a single key press. Enemies themselves though? I found myself wasting entire 'clips' of ammo on them before they dropped. Even with head-shot bonus damage. This gets really frustrating on the boss battles. Stronger enemies that have higher HP, and body size to push you around. You need to either kill or avoid these to unlock 'sector' maps that give you a new combination of cargo containers and new loot types to find.

Graphically it all looks quite nice. It is easy to tell what you need to pick up and what to avoid.

The various lighting effects make each cargo glow with various levels of intensity. Some feel warmer and more stable, while others are lifeless and cold. Helped by the amount of gravity per container and the buzzing of electronics and speaker systems inside them. Space effects are a little poor, and in some ways remind me of Light of Altair, looking good in scereenshots but failing to just make it work when in motion.

While there is not a lot of text, the choice of monospaced and decently sized fonts make it clear to read and parse. Something games are increasingly ignoring in space of thin white text on bright backgrounds.

Audio wise there's a nice clunking feeling as you stomp over containers and a lower level of sound when out in space. Enemies have a slightly non-threatening growl to them and weapons feel like they lack punch. This also probably does not help the poor combat component of the game.

In the home base, there's a muted song about being out alone in space that plays. It should be nothing special, but hearing it when you arrive after collecting a bunch of stuff really helps the 'going to get back home' feeling the game is going for. The rest of the tracks are more atmospheric, doing what music should do in sucking you into the game while not being offensive or distracting.

Controls feel tight and solid when in gravity environments, and providing just enough floaty controls when not to give you control but knowing you are at the mercy of the mass around you.

Despite combat being bad, triggering weapon attacks and using the drill is very responsive. I played it with a keyboard-mouse combo and it never felt like this was a game designed for a gamepad or joystick.

CargoCommander final words

I really want to like this one. It plays well and has the feeling of just one more run/sector to it. But the ammo situation really does not make me want to play it for too long due to how negatively it affects each run.

That said. This game knows that. The 'F' key is bound to a command that makes worker-guy shout out a loud 'FUCK YOU!', complete with pop up text. And there's a small amount of randomness to this that after several presses he will launch in to a longer tirade worthy of my anger towards politicians.

While single player, there's the usual leaderboards scoring comparison available to challenge people with. Absolutely non essential, but I'm growing to appreciate these kind of features, even in single-player titles.

But for the asking price of $10, it's a capable game for those wanting a platformer game with a bit of randomness built in.

Game Acquisition: On Sale (Bundle Stars).
Platform Used: Steam
Tweet Threads: 1 - 27 August 2016
PC Used: Scorptec Venom 2009 MK2

OS:Windows Vista/7
Processor:2 GHz (or 4 GHz for CPUs like Celeron/Duron)
Memory:2 GB RAM
Graphics:DirectX 9.0c compatible; integrated or very low budget cards may not work
DirectX®:9.0c
Hard Drive:200 MB HD space; 256 MB Video Memory