Review: Capsule Force

Capsule Force shines with its local multiplayer of up to four people on two teams. Your goal is to hop on a horizontally moving tram as you move from screen to screen in order to reach the goal at the end. Each consecutive screen becomes harder for your team’s color to move through, and thus, easier for the defending team to fight back in. Along with this, each of the worlds will feature a unique series of obstacles to hinder/help you ride your tram through; relieving any repetitiveness that one level may produce. This causes a good deal of balance to any players that seem to be dominating since the level will help out.

The controls are easily one of the most exciting aspects to Capsule Force. You can double jump, shoot, power-up your shot, dash, and use a shield. Any time you attack with your gun arms, or block with your force field, your jumping ability gets reset. This allows you to jump forever as long as you go back and forth between jumping and one other ability. This is especially important for the time trial modes since you can basically ‘fly’ through a level while simultaneously shooting at the targets. These mechanics allow for a good combination of movement around the screen as well as fending off your friends.

The big issue with Capsule Force is that its single player component gets old quick and without any online multiplayer enjoying the game at its best is a rarity. When playing alone your only game modes are basically time trials and target practice. One for each of the stages. This caused my time with Capsule Force to be quite short since getting people over to my house is difficult to do, especially if you don’t have four controllers. I would have loved to play this online with my friends but that isn’t in the game. It’s a major let down that this game can only be enjoyed in one type of setting for any real length of time.

I didn’t end up spending that much time with Capsule Force because the single player portion is quite limited. Though the controls handle well and the infinite jump mechanic is quite cool, without a variety in challenge there isn’t much left for me. A lack of online multiplayer really took the wind out of my sails. The game is fun when you can scrounge together local players but that is a rarity for myself these days. Make sure you have a good friend group nearby and enough controllers if you want to really enjoy this game.