Gadgetory

back at e3 2014 Microsoft gave us our first glimpse at cuphead and a lot of people myself included immediately fell in love with the game's unique art direction which really captured the look and feel of old-school 1930s cartoons and ever since that e3 I've been waiting year after year for this game to finally get released after push back and push back and Microsoft was awesome enough to actually send me a review code for this game so I just could not resist and had to do a dedicated video on it because thankfully this game did not disappoint at all now obviously there are gonna be some minor spoilers in this video but I'm gonna focus mostly on just showing boss battles from about roughly the first third of the game so there is a whole lot more to it than what you're gonna see right here but this gives you a good general idea of how it actually plays now before we get into gameplay the first thing I want to talk about is how well this game knocked a park with capturing that old-school aesthetic of old cartoons now some of this is fairly obvious for instance the visual ISM you can see the hand drawn characters hand-drawn backgrounds that kind of film grain effect and the dust and dirt that goes on the screen just like an old cartoon but there's a lot more to it than just that there's also sort of an audio component to it where all the sound of the game has this very kind of muffled warm feeling to it it's just enough to where you can understand what people are saying but at the same time it definitely has that kind of dirty realistic feeling that those little cartoons had but what really impressed me was the game's approach to frame rate now obviously for an action intensive game like this it makes a lot of sense for it to be 60fps which it is but that's not exactly true to kind of actual film experiences which are 24 but what they ended up doing was everything that's very clearly in 60fps is stuff that is important for gameplay cuphead himself the projectiles you shoot projectiles you have to dodge but everything else the backgrounds characters everything else moving around on the screen while it is technically in 60 it's all designed to look like it's actually running at 24 which gives us this really much more true film effect now this does create a little bit of a dissonance between you know your character moving around and everything else around him but you're so focused on the action most of the time and it just looks so good despite that fact that it's not really an issue now I don't want to go in depth on the game's story I'll let you guys actually find that out for yourselves if you play it but just to kind of give you a basic general idea it's fairly minimal but just like with the visuals and audio this is very intentional it's very true to the kind of style of these old cartoons more than anything it's just this odd mixture of kind of fun silly stuff but then also kind of surreal and weird and oddly dark and adult it just it just all works so well now as for the actual gameplay cuphead is a running gun shooter very much along the lines of think of Mega Man but instead of focusing on traditional levels that are then fold with a boss fight it's instead focused on just being a boss rush mode the whole way through your fighting boss after boss after boss with just a couple more traditional platforming levels thrown in the middle which mainly act as ways to give you a little practice and ways to save with gold to buy new abilities that might make certain bosses a little easier which you will need because this game is freaking hard just like the old-school retro games that it's emulating gameplay wise it also uses a lot of old-school game decisions for its difficulty there are no checkpoints in a boss fight if you die near the end you won't be sent back all the way to the beginning there is no way to recover health what you have at the start is what you have the whole way through and you just have to do your best to learn all the enemies different gimmicks to avoid taking damage and take them down little by little over time and it is such a great feeling when you actually beat a boss in this game there's just something so great about the idea of spending a whole hour tackling one level over and over and over again and when you actually do it right it actually only takes about two minutes I mean really pure constant wise this game is maybe only about an hour and 20 minutes if you do everything perfectly but in reality you're probably gonna spend at least eight if not ten or twelve hours depending on your skill level now cuphead does also offer a co-op mode which you might think oh yeah I'll just use that if I want to try and get through it easier not really the case unlike other co-op games or normally bosses are just compensated to have a little extra health because you have double the firepower cuphead I think also puts into account the fact that you not only have double the firepower but you can also keep each other alive by reviving your teammates so enemies end up having tons of health when you're a co-op which keeps that same satisfying level of difficulty even if you're going with a friend and hopefully you're playing with someone that's actually really good otherwise you've probably stopped talking to them so so far this is pretty much been non-stop praise for me there's gotta be some downsides to this game right honestly not really as far as I'm concerned I mean my only real complaint after finishing the game is that the difficulty curve does feel like it's a little all over the place there are some boss fights during to that I had a lot more problems with and I did in world 3 and vice versa but honestly considering how relatively short the game is and how difficult it is the whole way through it hasn't really that big of a deal really Cup had to be is another example of something we've been seeing a lot of this year we have these games that are technically indie in their scope they're indie studios but they have the financial backing of major companies other games like pyre and hell-blade where it's this very focused experience and the game knows exactly what kind of game it wants to be it's not a triple-a title where they're taking this kitchen sink approach trying to make sure it has everything that's buzzword you know make sure it's open-world make sure there's RPG elements add this and this and that instead they just know what kind of game they want to cup it to be and made exactly that and for 20 bucks it is freaking great