Capes

I went into Capes expecting another XCOM clone wearing a costume, and the mechanics immediately corrected me. The comparison to XCOM is almost automatic, but it does not hold up for long, because Capes strips out the cover system and drops every random-percentage hit roll from the equation entirely. Every punch, lightning bolt, and crystal barrage lands exactly as the tooltip says. The variable you cannot control is the enemy AI, which keeps pressure on without the cheap randomness that can make XCOM feel unfair. For players who rage-quit tactics games over missed 95% shots, this design choice alone is worth knowing about. The four-hero squad format runs on grid movement with two actions per character per turn, plus an Ultimate that charges through specific in-mission conditions before it becomes a free action. What elevates the combat above genre average is the cross-hero synergy layer. Mercurial, the speedster, can sprint adjacent to Facet's crystal formations and extend them into blocking walls or conducting pylons. Weathervane can then arc electricity through those same crystals to chain damage across multiple targets. Rebound, a teleporting blade-user built around backstabs, can reposition Facet when his own armour-up ability restricts his movement, and Facet returns the favour by empowering Rebound's blades with crystal for extra damage. Ignis can lend her flame to Mercurial's sprint, leaving a fire trail across the battlefield. These synergies are listed in a database accessible from the team management screen, and checking it before mission selection is not optional at higher difficulties - it is the build-order phase. Each hero also has a personal challenge list that unlocks additional skill points, and revisiting older missions to hit those optional objectives feeds directly into progression when new recruits arrive at level one. The difficulty deserves an honest flag. Even on easier settings, the game has a habit of sending fresh enemy waves exactly when a mission looks like it should be wrapping up. The result can shift from deliberate puzzle-solving into frantic triage, and a small number of players in the community have bounced off this specific pattern. There is no undo button in combat, which sharpens the stakes but also sharpens the frustration when you realise a move three actions ago opened a lane you cannot close. The trade-off is genuine tension, and the lack of hero customisation - no costume swaps, no created characters - keeps the team count finite and legible, which actually helps newcomers learn the synergy vocabulary faster than a roster-bloated alternative would. On the presentation side, the in-mission art and the visual-novel-style dialogue panels look genuinely good. The animated cutscenes are a different story - they are janky enough that reviewers across the board flagged them, and the story itself front-loads its intrigue well, then loses momentum through a padded middle before a rushed ending. The setting, an original dystopian city called King City where The Company outlawed superheroes two decades after the villains won, has an 80s-to-90s comics energy that sidesteps Marvel and DC fatigue by not borrowing from either. The tone sits closer to grimdark resistance narrative than superhero power fantasy, which is a deliberate creative choice and one that lands better in the combat framing than in the writing. For strategy players, this is a roughly 30-hour singleplayer campaign with optional patrol missions for extra SP grinding. The tutorial is functional and covers the basics without condescending. Steam user reception sits in the mixed range - the positives cluster around combat depth and synergy design, the negatives around difficulty spikes and enemy wave pacing. No mod ecosystem to speak of, and no multiplayer. For a debut title from a small Australian studio, the mechanical foundations here are notably solid, and the synergy-first design philosophy is the kind of thing I would rather see iterated on than abandoned.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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