Lococycle is a guilty pleasure.
Itâs a friend you hang out with, in private. Youâre not comfortable introducing it to your parents and it sure as hell isnât winning any âgames as artâ arguments and the like. In all aspects, Lococycle is an incredibly stupid game.
In Lococycle you play as two-wheeler I.R.I.S., manufactured as a premium, intelligent weapon designed by a corporation called Big Arms. When she decides to flee her corporate overlords to attend a biker gatheringâthe Freedom Rally held in Scottsburg, Indianaâshe accidentally catches hold of her mechanic Pabloâs pants and ends up dragging him behind her throughout the entire game. Sheâs oblivious to all this, of course, and despite her boasting of understanding thousands of languages, she canât seem to understand his pleas shouted out in Spanish throughout the entire game. On her journey, sheâs got to fend off the Big Arms peons by using her wheels to punch and kick through them. Sheâll even sometimes take the fight into the air, thanks to an apparently never-ending momentum. Yes, none of this makes sense.
Are you still with me? Cool.
One of Big Armsâ corporate big wigs calls in S.P.I.K.E., a rival bike also manufactured as a weapon, to take her in. The first time you defeat S.P.I.K.E., he decides you have only one clear advantage: the human that is (still) attached to your back wheel. This is, of course, absurd. First off: why and how is Pablo still stuck there? And heâs not exactly an ace in the hole. He just got stuck there.
But when S.P.I.K.E. finds a bubbly, obese woman to tack onto himself and rides away with confidence that heâs now matched to battle I.R.I.S. again, I chuckled. Itâs this exact kind of stupidity that will, if you let it, carry you through a lot of the game.
The entire experience is on-rails, meaning your forward movement is predetermined by the game. You simply zig and zag through traffic and a hurdle of enemies. There are three main aspects to Lococycleâs combat: you can shoot down enemy vehicles, melee strike on-foot enemies like mechs and scientists encased in electrified balls, or hit the A button for a counterattack when the game prompts it. That last piece of the puzzle is surely the one to get the most tired the fastest. But that doesnât mean the rest of the combat wonât also quickly feel monotonous. Because it certainly does.
The level designs donât help, either. For the first half of the game, youâll still have new enemies to meet and therefore new ways to put your growing combat skills to the test. When youâre unlocking combo bonuses (like elemental damage and stun moves thanks to Pablo) and extra bullets for your guns, itâs still fun to tackle enemies, especially if theyâre also new.
And then Lococycle starts to drag more than poor Pablo. Youâll run into the same sequences over and over again. Set of cars, followed by sets of jet-packers, followed by a few mechs, followed byâŠand everything starts to blur together. It feels a lot like filler.
The latter half of the gameâthere are five chapters, three levels in eachâstarts throwing some tougher, boss-like enemies at you. Though technically a change of pace, itâs still a dull series of âshoot here, then here, then hereâ and then some of that âcounter now, counter again, counter a third time.â And the same tactic is employed, a few times recycled. Youâre simply responding to command prompts.
In normal combat scenarios I eventually just started mashing the X and Y buttons to alternate my swift attacks with my Pablo attacks, where Iâd swing him around to hit multiple enemies at a time. And, of course, the occasional A button when a counterattack prompt showed up on screen. It became routine. There are tons of QTE moments, too, that, even if you miss them, donât feel like too big a deal. The game is fairly easy except for when itâs being overbearing. Not much of a challenge as much as it is a test of your endurance.
This all sounds overly negative. Mostly because Iâve finished the game in its entirety. I think if I quit mid-way through, though Iâd miss some of the more fun and whackier moments and live-action cutscenes near the end, I wouldnât have come away with such a bad taste in my mouth.
Thatâs the problem with guilty pleasures. Enjoy them too much and youâll feel sick, gluttonous. The guilt overcomes the pleasure. Lococycle is a game whose personalityâthat brand of humorâis so specific that it probably wonât appeal to a large number of people. It sometimes makes passing remarks about America and big businesses and government. There are wafts of commentary on racism and stereotypes. Theyâre more cursory than they are in bad taste though, again, itâs a very specific kind of humor. Some people might hate this gameâand with the amount of repetition youâll experience through the bulk of it, I wouldnât blame you. But others might have fun punching things as a motorcycle. I mean, how ludicrous is that? And how much fun have people had simply beating things up in the past?
While playing Lococycle on the Xbox One, my boss Stephen Totilo walked over and asked me how it was. I answered in a way that I thought would be the most relevant for him. I explained that itâs full of stupid humor for the sake of being stupid, that itâs a lot of mindless combat. Youâre stringing combos together and trying to get perfect scoresâyou know, no deaths and all hits. He saw through how I coated the answer though. âSo basically itâs your kind of game.â Sure, itâs stupid and itâll eventually feel tired. But heâs right. I like to beat things up and avoid getting beaten up.
So, yeah. The FMV is intentionally painfully awkward in that cheesy 80s movie kind of way. I.R.I.S. is a bad imitation of GLaDOS (and even steals some of her lines, but everything she says in gameâand she talks pretty much nonstop throughout itâis a reference to something). But for those first few levels when Iâm rolling my eyes for the 15th time at I.R.I.S. completely misinterpreting Pablo and dragging him on what is surely to be the worst week of his life, and smacking enemies around like theyâre ping-pong balls, I have to admitâŠI kind of enjoyed that for a while there. And thatâs what we call a guilty pleasure.
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