POPUCOM

I came into POPUCOM expecting a casual time-waster with a cute coat of paint. I left it roughly eleven hours later having been genuinely outplayed by a colour-coded blob creature, which is not a sentence I thought I would ever write. This is a mandatory two-player co-op game with zero solo option, and that constraint is doing real structural work. The core loop is built around a weapon called the Rainbow Blaster: you and your partner each carry two unique colours of gel, and you need to match three or more pellets of the same colour on an enemy to clear them. Because your colour set and your partner's colour set are different, you cannot brute-force anything alone. You have to call out targets, time your shots, and consciously hand off lanes of attack. For a game tagged casual on Steam, the coordination ceiling is actually pretty demanding once the enemy density picks up. Beyond the Rainbow Blaster, the game hands you four additional tools over the course of the campaign: a shield that doubles as a partner-deployable platform, a mortar ball that breaks specific walls in a way that Metroid fans will recognise immediately, a grapple-and-swap bot for repositioning objects and yanking helmets off armoured Pomus, and a character called Captain Kitty for heavy lifting. Switching between these in real time while also managing colour combos on moving targets is where POPUCOM earns its Metacritic 83. The level design keeps layering these tools into new configurations rather than swapping them in and out like some co-op games do, so by the back half you are genuinely juggling systems rather than following a tutorial checklist. The boss encounters are the one weak point: too many of them recycle earlier designs with a slight speed or armour bump rather than introducing a new wrinkle, which blunts what should be the campaign's sharpest moments. From a performance and online co-op standpoint, the PC version has been stable post-launch. The v1.1.0 update added a Quick Join system for online Story Mode, a Stage Preference filter to help you find partners at the same level, and NPLN service integration to shore up multiplayer stability. If the "finding a randomer" experience concerned you early on, those patches have addressed the friction. Party Mode scales the chaos up to four players and adds a separate bank of stages built for that group size, which gives the game genuine replay value past the story credits. Cosmetics are earned in-play or bought optionally, and there is no progression gate behind a monetisation wall, which coming from the Arknights studio is the right call and worth saying out loud. Who should skip it: anyone without a reliable co-op partner. There is no bot fill, no solo practice mode, and the puzzle design physically requires two humans at all times. Controller reconnection issues have also been flagged by local co-op players as causing forced restarts, though checkpoints are frequent enough to limit damage. Who should buy it right now: anyone who burned through It Takes Two or Split Fiction and is sitting on co-op withdrawal. POPUCOM is a cleaner, more replayable package than most of its peers in that bracket, and the level design in the mid-to-late campaign is legitimately up there with the best 3D platformers of recent memory.

Fred · Scout Team

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