The level of detail in Freakpocalypse is dizzying. You can interact with nearly everything, and there are realms of recorded speech. It’s a shame then that the actual story itself isn’t tight or engaging enough to make this a worthwhile …
The level of detail in Freakpocalypse is dizzying. You can interact with nearly everything, and there are realms of recorded speech.
It’s a shame then that the actual story itself isn’t tight or engaging enough to make this a worthwhile experience for seasoned point and clickers.
A game based on the famous comic strip and its universe, it sees you play as unpopular high school student Coop.
He’s a day dreamer and a mildly likeable shmuck, but it’s never really clear why he’s quite so hated by his peers. Who are, by and large, a hateful bunch.
Sometimes this translates into decent comedy, but by and large the humour is very low brow.
Which is fine to a point, but there’s a real powderpuff nature to the puzzles that makes the game feel far too lightweight.
This is likely as this is the first part in a trilogy – as the Freakpocalypse element of the title is only really explored at the end of this chapter.
So for most of the game’s short run time you’re in Coop’s school, solving problems that require very little thinking on your part.
You’ll either be sent on fetch quests or have to work out puzzles that are fairly easy to solve. What isn’t easy is finding exactly what you need.
This is where the level of detail in the presentation becomes an actual issue.
There are so many conversation trees, so many items that might be picked up, and different ways of interacting with objects that often the best way to solve a puzzle is to click everything. This is fine at first, but it eventually gets tiresome as progress grinds to a halt.
The fact that the map isn’t always the easiest to decipher all makes this a game that never really offers a fluid experience – like the best point and click titles provide.
You never feel like you’re moving smoothly through the story. Just going over a road with almost endless speed bumps – bumps that occasionally raise a laugh, but there’s a growing frustration as you struggle to make any real progress.
Ultimately Freakpocalypse won’t disappoint fans of the comic strip – who likely backed the game when it was funded via Kickstarter – but it won’t blow them away either. It’ll likely leave everyone else a bit cold.
