QCF: Lococycle

This Review was Frelanced by Rob Rich; you can find his other work here.

 weapons manufacturer without morals, highly advanced and extremely dangerous artificially intelligent war machines, A lightning strike, and Self-awareness—adventure.  No, I’m not talking about Short Circuit (although I totally could be), I’m talking about Twisted Pixel’s latest…Thing. It’s more like what Short Circuit would be if Johnny 5 were a female motorcycle with a tenuous grip on reality and an auto mechanic stuck to his leg. Also there are tourist traps! I know that barely makes any sense and makes me seem like I may have a substance abuse problem. That’s LocoCycle.

I.R.I.S and S.P.I.K.E are two hyper-intelligent motorcycles developed by the bungling yet still evil Big Arms Corporation. Due to even more bungling than your typical bungling evil organization normally allows, I.R.I.S ends up getting struck by lightning and her systems are fried. Henchman Number 2 (or 3, or maybe they use the lettering system I dunno) takes her to Big Arms’ in-house mechanic in an attempt to avoid getting blamed for the brand new deathmobile’s untimely demise, and of course things go wrong. In the middle of her check-up, I.R.I.S becomes self-aware and decides she yearns for freedom. At a motorcycle rally. It’s Twisted Pixel, what do you want?

The catch is that poor Pablo (the mechanic I mentioned earlier) has gotten his pant leg stuck to I.R.I.S’ chassis—so her run for freedom turns into his nightmarish hostage situation. Therefore, the unlikely (and unwilling) duo set out to earn their (her) freedom. Of course the Big Arms goons aren’t too happy about her escape and will dog her every move. Even S.P.I.K.E joins in the chase; popping up every now and then for a rather ridiculous bike-on-bike battle.

I’m so at odds over how I feel about LocoCycle. Simply starting the game was a headache as the base 2GB download isn’t enough. I also had to download an additional Data Pack for another 1.9GB. Lovely.  Once I was finally able to start playing I had to sit through a rather awkward FMV intro for I’m guessing somewhere in the neighborhood of ten minutes. however long it was, my 360 display dimmed before the movie was over. That’s right, it almost went into sleep mode mid-video.

The first ten minutes of gameplay are incredibly cool as you drive around as I.R.I.S shooting up pursuing vehicles, plowing through traffic, and beating up (yes, “beating up”) other enemies in melee combat (yes, “melee combat”). Air-dashing back and forth between enemies and beating them up with tires of fury, using Pablo as a sort of ranged boomerang attack, stringing combos together, performing slick counter-attacks, and all that other bombastic action is fantastic - until you’ve seen all of it five times within almost as many minutes. This is actually LocoCycle’s biggest recurring theme: reusing the same mechanic/joke/gameplay elements so often that they completely lose their luster.

“Fist-fighting” an evil motorcycle in midair while tearing down the highway? Awesome, I can get behind that. Doing it three times or more in succession? Not so much. Countering a giant metal disk thrown by a mechsuit, and then rushing forward to beat the piss out of it? Utterly fantastic. Doing that same thing close to a dozen times, spread out across multiple levels? Yuck. This game manages to make an action sequence in which the evil motorcycle commandeers a helicopter and the rogue motorcycle beats it up in midair boring. On top of that, I haven’t even gotten to the irritating way the roads twist and turn, throwing off your aim constantly. Or the over-reliance on QTEs. And yet…

The thing is, as I earned more and more points from improved performances and began to upgrade I.R.I.S (and even Pablo) into an engine of death, I began to enjoy myself. Virtually every single gameplay element, save what happens in the final two acts, is recycled at least once (more often 5 or more times). Almost all of the jokes fall flat. QTEs are everywhere. But I still wanted to see how high a score I could earn in a given level. I still wanted to see what the next doomed-to-be-repeated wacky challenge the game would throw at me. And I have to say that despite the general roughness the final showdown with S.P.I.K.E is actually pretty amazing.

In the end, I can’t help but liken my experience with LocoCycle to Pablo’s time spent with I.R.I.S. It was an exciting start, but soon I just started praying for it to be over. I wanted the pain to end, and would have considered lopping off one of my limbs in order to get out of it. However, the more I endured, the easier it became to endure in the first place. Moreover, by the time the ride was over I couldn’t help but think back on it fondly, even with all the bumps along the way.