I have already covered in my quickies two out of four Ice-Pick Lodge’s games –
a depressing story of an epidemic outbreak in Pathologic, and
a dark yet wonderful world of The Void. In this quickie I shall describe their third game called “Cargo! The quest for gravity” – the only game by IPL that cannot be described as gloomy, dark and hostile. Quite the opposite, actually, as Cargo! is a very colorful game.
The game begins with an intro where a crew of two flies over an island in a hot air balloon. The island is their destination, however, they do not land, but crash instead. One of the crew members – a woman – is the player’s character throughout the game. After the intro, the little naked midgets talk to the player using rhymes. The player is supposed to go around and kick the midgets for “FUN”, after which they often explode in colors. Soon afterwards, three machine God-heads speak explaining that the world is destroyed and must be rebuilt by reconnecting various flying around parts of it, which the player can do with paying with the collected FUN. Collecting FUN does is not limited to running around and kicking midgets, fortunately. Among other things, you can attack them to your vehicle and give them a ride or leave on the ground a tune for them to dance around. The main activity of the player is completing various quests he is given – from saving drowning midgets through racing against them to maneuvering a tornado. To complete them one must build different vehicles. Some quests are not obvious and I had to scratch my head coming up with ideas what developers could possibly want me to do at this particular stage of the game. One quest I even completed randomly without knowing what to do until I accidentally did it. Note, however, that it’s not because quests in Cargo! are too difficult – they are banal – but they are often too random! Sometimes the player is not provided with a clear description what he must do and what is expected of him is to perform an action that was neither encountered before nor one that uses common sense.
Building vehicles is the focus of the game, however, it is very undeveloped. To build a vehicle, first it is needed to find a base of it, then gather parts – either by finding them around the map or buying them with FUN. You can build your own vehicles, and you are free to customize existing ones, which you get from finding blueprints. Interestingly, during the game the player will make land and flying vehicles as well as submarines. The game always provides you with a working blueprint of what you need though, so it is not Kerbal Space Program by any means – assembling a vehicle you need is just a few clicks at best, customizing them or coming up with your own ideas is redundant. I have to add that this game is arcade and nor vehicles nor anything else behaves like it would in real life, so don’t expect any kind of simulation from it. Once you build a necessary vehicle you may complete a quest. There’s only a handful of quests and the game is only few hours long. After each quest there’s a lot of colorful sparks flying around and a sound of clapping so the player can feel awesome.
I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t use the least appropriate vehicle to finish a quest
The gameworld is exceptionally tiny. It’s just one location which can be flied through in a matter of one minute. At least there’s also an underwater part, but it doesn’t add much. Cargo!’s world is the smallest I have ever seen in a video game and I don’t think it even has any competition in this regard. When you fly too far away you are presented with a message telling you to turn back and if you don’t the game will teleport you back. At least not to make the location too boring the game is divided into four different seasons: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, which make the world look quite different.
While the graphics are very nice and the game is quite pretty, the sounds are very basic and voice overs are terrible. I did not want to listen to them anymore after a short time and just read the text and skipped listening to them. What’s worse the quality of writing is equal to voice overs – it’s so bad that the sole reason why I read it was only for the purpose of letting you know in this quickie how bad it is – it’s atrocious! Not only it barely makes sense, but also it’s just simply dumb and tries hard to be funny but fails at it terribly. Music is not much better either and it didn’t annoy me only because the game is so short that I barely begun to play it when I have already finished it through the end… actually not quite. I did not manage to complete the last quest available in the game because of a game-breaking bug, even though I did not encounter any bugs before. I only watched a walkthrough of this quest and outro on the Internet. This means, however, that the bug does not affect everyone and I had happen to have been just unlucky. In addition to the story mode there is also a sandbox mode, but because of a tiny gameworld and arcade physics it does not really provide any pleasure nor will it allow you to come up with crazy ideas for vehicles as there aren’t that many parts to build with anyway. The game has two endings, which depend on the player’s performance in saving naked midgets.
There isn’t much more to the game, so this quickie has to be very short if I am not to artifically lengthen it. Cargo! The quest for gravity is a game that doesn’t really have anything amusing to offer and can be completed in just six hours. Although the game tells the player to do a lot of things for FUN, there isn’t much fun in it. I can’t really recommend it to anyone as the only interesting point of this game, perhaps besides its weirdness, is building vehicles, but since it’s so simplified and undemanding it’s hardly a reason to play Cargo!. There’s at least one game that does it much better and can be played much longer than what Ice-Pick Lodge presented to us.