There are games out there that are clearly designed for niche markets. I play a lot of different games doing this gig and there are lots of times that I’ll never go back and play something, even if I give it a pretty good review. This happens because even if a game isn’t for me there are basics that all games must hit and do well. This means I can hate a game and still give it a good score and love a game and knock it as sub-par. Unfortunately Office Freakout™ just seems to fall into the bad game category all around.
“Loading is so slow that it feels like I’m playing a game on the PS1 that’s full of smudges.”
The game is about as simple as it gets in terms of gameplay. You play as an office worker stuck at your place of employ after hours. A mysterious voice comes over the PA system and coaxes you into destroying everything by any means necessary. It’s a beautifully simple idea, but it just never really goes anywhere beyond that initial premise. Office Freakout™ is the sort of game where you’ll see and do just about everything within the first hour of play.
You are simply a pair of floating hands and spend you r time hitting the fully destructible environment. It’s a blast when you get going, but the feeling simply doesn’t last past the first few levels. You can pick up tons of different objects to use as weapons, but most of the time you’ll just be punching office equipment as you race the timer.
As you do this you can build a RAGE meter that when full, will let you go into the game’s RAGE Mode. I’m not entirely sure what this does other that drop some dub-step into the mix for the little bit that it lasts. I think you become stronger and get more points, but it doesn’t feel all that different from normal time aside from the sick beats. But if you do manage to go into double rage mode (going into rage after already being in rage) you can get a special weapon that does more damage.
The goal of each floor of this wacky office building to simply to break as much stuff as you can until the level key appears someplace in the stage. Once this happens you can pick it up and unlock the elevator that will take you to the next floor where you can continue the madness. It’s really as simple as it sounds, although there are a few threats that will get in your way.
As it’s after hours no humans other than yourself are here, but security is still around. But these aren’t humans, instead being robots that are just the player model with a robot skin. These guys are activated after enough damage is done and spawn out of the water cooler(s). Early on they aren’t much of a threat but the longer you play the more will spawn.
There is no death per say in Office Freakout™, instead the robot guards will catch you after doing enough damage. As the levels tend to be pretty cramped due to all the crap you have to break, having more than a handful of these guys in play will quickly ruin your day. You can kill them but they tend to be damage sponges most of the time. Even using various weapons doesn’t feel all that more effective over your fists.
As this is an office many of the weapons available are themed around the setting. The Unreal Engine 4 isn’t being pushed at all, but the levels and objects all like fine, although the entire game has this weird filter over it that makes me want to wipe my screen to clear things up. You pick up and toss items all around and repeat ad nauseum and that’s about it. The only pick-me-ups that lifts the game up comes from the special items. These items all sparkle in some fashion and can do some serious damage with in hilarious ways.
Perhaps you pick up a notepad that whose pages you can turn into paper airplane bombs, take down a fire extinguisher to blow stuff away, snap off the blade of a paper cutter to slice and dice, or use that little red stapler to unload staples on the world. There are lots more of these and they are really the only thing that keeps you going. It’s fun playing just to see what new item pops up as the game goes on.
But one nice thing is that Office Freakout™ isn’t short on features, although they don’t really do much for the base gameplay. Before jumping into a level you can check out a huge list of thing to achieve. Perhaps you need to smash 100 monitors, break 50 staplers, kill 80 guards, and on and on. Those aren’t actual numbers of course, but they are all really high in the requirements department.
Doing these and getting high-scores will help you unlock a bunch of features within the game. You can unlock new arm skins, additional special weapons, as well as environmental textures. There are tons of these and if you like unlocking things you may get a kick out of them, but unfortunately the gameplay is so mundane that it’ll feel more like a chore than anything. Getting powers and tools are cool, but you are still just breaking stuff and they wear out far too quickly to let you have that serious fun with them.
Office Freakout™ simply wears out its welcome far too quickly. It burns out it’s only gameplay mechanic and doesn’t really have much ease to keep you engaged after this first few levels. That being said it all works fine, so the game isn’t in any way broken, it just relies far to heavily on a single mechanic with the whole game feeling more like a mini-game in a larger game than anything else.
Where the game really irks me is in the horrible menu system. Everything is extremely hard to navigate and looks confusing even to experienced gamers. Not only that, but there are neon green specks in the upper left of the screen that tells me the .PNG overlay of the menu wasn’t rendered properly. Oh, and I really do hope you like un-skippable cut scene as the game won’t let you skip them the first time you play. This isn’t often a huge deal, but these video demos go on for ages! It’s funny because the game is so simple that everything could have been explained on a single loading screen.
On that note, I want to talk about the loading times; oh, god the loading times. Loading is so slow that it feels like I’m playing a game on the PS1 that’s full of smudges. It takes longer to get into one of the games small levels than it does to load a stage in almost any other game I’ve played in the past few years. This starts with the studios intro logo that looks to be running at about five frames per second. I’ve never seen a studio logo video run slowly before!
It’s all a real pain getting into a game because you have to load the menu, then load the secondary menu to pick a level, then load the level itself. Each of the loads can take anywhere from thirty-seconds to an entire minute to load. The game makes you do a lot of waiting for levels that only take a few minutes to get through. There is so much here that simply isn’t ready for prime-time that it hurts.
But the real kicker is that the game is charging $12 bucks for what is essentially a single mini-game. Indie game like this do have their pace, but I simply don’t see enough content to merit the high price tag. It this were five bucks or less, then I’d consider it, but as it stands I can’t really recommend Office Freakout™ as it’s presented. At the end of the day it just feels like an Early Access game that needs some more time to cook in the oven.
2/5
‘Bad’
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