Review | Capes - Spandex And Scott Snyder
I shuddered, recently, seeing Scott Snyder, the DC writer who kicked off a stellar Batman run years ago during the New 52 Since then he’s gone on to do murder and crime comics, horror, and everything else in between. There’s a bit in Al Ewing’s Thor where Thor himself gets stuck, now, in MCU banter and can’t break himself of it. His own thoughts bleed out of his head and are replaced by near-constant asides and jokes about the ridiculous situation he’s in. Scott Snyder says we’re due for a superhero resurgence. The hair up my arms travels in rows straight up like some kind of horrible bug has landed on me.
That thought sends me chasing something all through the night, right? Doing the dishes, catching up on X-Men 97’ and sitting down to review Capes for startmenu.co.uk. Capes is an overhead strategy game swapping pop culture sci-fi military hardware for superhero spandex, streetwear and leather coats. An endless blend of “paramilitary wear” either way you look at it.
Scott Snyder, a DC writer whose name you can find in white, bold letters on the pages of The New 52’s Batman - wait, hold on, that was ten years ago? You’re fucking kidding me, seriously? Let me bring you up to date, Scott Snyder, a DC writer who you can find between the pages of Dark Knights: Metal- huh, almost five years already? Well, the point is, Snyder says Superheroes are due for a resurgence.
Oh hi, Scott.
Like the best writers at any comic book company can do anyway, let’s crib an old turn of phrase from Alan Moore and turn it into a universe-spanning idea: the man has a flavour-rich brain, you can’t fault DC for not being able to properly pay the man back in the day, right? I kid, I kid. If that phrase makes your hair stand on end, don’t worry, you’re still with us. That’s the line from Watchmen, right? I dunno, I never read it.
Capes is an overhead, tactical Supehero game with violence-polycule-building elements that released in May - but listen, can you make it that far?
In Al Ewing’s latest run on The Immortal Thor the God of Thunder gets a curious narrative affliction. His brain starts leaking thoughts out onto the page in little white bubbles, and they’re all filled with constant asides and sarcastic jokes about the situation that is all too real to him - Thor, in the pages of a comic book, is as real as you or me. We accept, in our own way, the limit of the page, but not the limit of the panel.
“A lot of violence just happened!” quips our purple-haired, Life Is Strange Tumblr girl in a Wasteland Weekend Shoulderpad. We’re dated before the game has gotten out of the tutorial - a woman dies from machine gun fire and the game can’t choose not to laugh afterwards so it moves to the next beat in the script.
And comic books move faster. They’re always moving faster. You pick up a comic like Spider-Man and by the time you’re finished reading the series, whatever’s new has been published in a year or two right under your nose. Outside of cities draped in spandex, horror and mystery take root and crime and murder ballads come back. The thought bubbles of Capes feel less hip, and more like Freedom Fighters did when it was referencing comics from more than twenty years before the game came out. Capes wears its influence in the colour of the jumpsuit, but the jumpsuit has been sitting in someone else’s closet.
Marvel Knights got it right - it feels good to hit a motherfucker with his friend, and I think my bigger disappointment when playing Capes was that there was so many colours of abilities but they’re from another series - these tacticool mutants control and play like Xenosquad Marines do in XCOM. What’s the point of putting big crystals all over my body if a guy can’t get thrown into me? I can teleport around and zap someone, but I can’t do it from on top of a car or zap a baddie into another one? It’s not like it has to stand up the entire history of comic books, let alone video games, but it constantly makes me think of playing other video games. That’s gotta be like, a cardinal sin, right?
There’s a moment in every good superhero comic where a punch connects, or a hammer tears a page border into the next, they speak with the language of the medium. In order to take all of this magic and costume seriously, we have to not believe in what we’re seeing. A bowling ball ricochets off of a wall and tears into the face of a nazi-cop and leaves teeth scattered as ammunition back for violence. We don’t take them serious but with the sense of fun injected even into the violence that makes us wince.
We have to, as readers, routinely believe we’re being fucked with and continue going on anyway. When something is looking in the eye and asking me “You don’t really take all of this seriously, do you?” even the jokes stop landing. Like a comedian who has to explain their own act at the end of standup, I’m not laughing and I’m not on his side.
Video games, with their increasingly longer development times, with the ways developers have to pray just to stick together for successive launches are starting to look a little long in the face, the skin is starting to hang off of the bones a little too much. By the time you’ve got something, anything to pull from comic books at all - they’ve already started to move on without you.
