Couch coop games have been around for virtually the entirety of the video game industry. Sitting down with a friend to overcome the odds is one of the best experiences, and it has only improved over the years. With studios such as Hazelight Studios at the forefront of cooperative experiences, it only made sense that more studios would build upon a similar formula.
This is where Orbitals comes in, a new cooperative adventure from Shapefarm, a Tokyo-based studio who have funnily enough brought in one of Hazelight Studios’ level designers, Jakob Lundgren, to direct it. This is a heavily anime-infused cooperative action game with a lot of promise, but is it all flair, or is there deeper substance to Orbitals?
Unfortunately, starting things off, one of the more disappointing aspects of Orbitals is its length. For a cooperative action game with puzzle-solving mechanics, we have become accustomed to a decent amount of time together with friends, overcoming hurdles and obstacles. Expectations were high for this anime-infused adventure, but sadly it falls a little short.
It took us a little over four hours to complete the campaign, with very little reason to go back and play again. There are around eleven chapters, a handful of them being quick missions while the others take place in their biomes. With that said, while the bosses aren't anything to write home about, outside the final fight, there are some rather creative areas to travel through.
This includes lava levels, beautiful, wrecked utopias, and frostbitten spaceships. There are some strangely structured puzzles in the sense it’s hard to imagine how they’d operate under normal parameters, but they still make for some intriguing designs. Still, we do wish the campaign would have been a bit longer because it feels more like an episode of an anime rather than a season.
Because of this, the story of Orbitals doesn’t truly get to flourish. It starts off with a young man by the name of Togen helping essentially extract the souls of the protagonist, Maki and Omura, into pods, so their bodies can be replenished at any time. The story then immediately gets hurled fifteen years into the future where Maki and Omura are on the hunt for three Reactor Cassettes to fix up their ship.
Sadly, that is virtually the entire plot, with very few twists and turns throughout. There are a couple of intriguing points, but they tend to go nowhere. The two are sent to three different areas of space to find these Cassettes and return them to Togen. The problem is that the areas are devoid of much life. There is one character you meet along the way, but that’s truly it. The rest of the area is lifeless and just instructs the player to go from point A to point B with only chatter between the two characters in-between.
Granted, some of the chatter can be comical, but some of the story beats are paced peculiarly. Not necessarily that it’s going too fast, but outward observations and conversations between characters feel forced instead of nuanced. Even the ending has a predictable setup, and with so little time to build upon the cast of characters. It has trouble establishing any emotional link with most of the characters.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://hardcoregamer.com/review-orbitals/
