Oh dear oh dear oh dear, I don’t think I’ve had my opinion of a game crash this hard before.
The beginning was great. I was charmed by the pixel-ragdoll artstyle, the beginning was difficult but quite enjoyable once I got the hang of it, the sex animations were well-done and well-animated, and they even had zombie dogs in the first stage with not only knotting animations, but actual mechanics and achievements related to that knotting. For a little while, it looked as though this was going to be the next big h-project to look out for.
And then I played the other stages of the game, and oh boy.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of a difficulty curve. Captivity does not have one of those. What Captivity has is a difficulty vertical wall. Each stage past the first is unique in their terribleness, and after getting to about wave 20 in the 3 stages after the shack I had no desire to keep playing no matter how good the porn was. To give a brief run-down:
Caves: The entire area save a small section of the starting area is covered in pitch-blackness, so even seeing your enemies in the first place is a challenge. One very common enemy in this stage is a fly that will lock you in an instant-grapple if you are facing it while it flies towards you. If it does this, you will drop your gun, and will have to run around trying to pick it up while likely being smacked around by a swarm of enemies. Another very common enemy is a maggot that will jump at you and lock you in another instant grapple. This maggot is so small that even hitting it is an exercise in patience, let alone seeing it while you’re busy with all the other enemies, let alone seeing it in the absolute pitch darkness. In this game, getting locked into about 3-5 grapples means that it becomes impossible to escape them unless you use an exploit that I’m pretty sure will be patched out.
You can pay about 1250 dollars, or about 2-3 waves worth of money, to turn on a generator to light up more parts of the map. I mean, even after that most of it is shrouded in complete darkness anyway, but you can see more and also gain access to the weapons shop. Good, right? Wrong. As soon as you turn on the generator you will attract the attention of absolutely enormous flying mobs that take an inordinate amount of abuse (and ammo) before they die, and their lunging stinger attack covers an outrageous amount of space. I question what the use of the dodge-roll even is if enemies just hit a wide enough area to bypass it anyway.
To top it all off, this mob is also bugged. If it completes its rape-loop animation, it will carry you to a very high-up platform, it’s “nest”. If it grapples you again while you're there, it will soft-lock you game and you will be forced to restart.
Suffice to say, after forcing myself to reach wave 20 here, I had neither the time nor the patience to analyze the other 2 stages properly, so here is a sloppy rundown.
Jungle: An almost-perfectly flat map where you will get swarmed by goblins. One of these goblins puts down a bear trap that will instantly ragdoll you should you ever touch it, and if you do not go through the tedious process of clearing each one you see with your pistol, the map will quickly become intraversible. The orcs at least weren’t as bad, and this stage is probably the one least needing of tweaking.
Space Station: You are locked in a tiny corridor where you are beset upon by very, very fast aliens and metroids that shoot taser balls at you. If you get hit by a taser ball you will be instantly ragdollized, drop your weapon, and most likely be grappled. I also found to my dismay that my exploit for escaping grabs didn’t work here.
I didn’t play the final stage, and I have no desire to. Suffice to say I found the game after the shack to be next to unplayable. It’s not the challenge that’s the issue. Night of Revenge is harder than this game and I found it several hundreds of times more fun than this. The issue is that the difficulty here isn’t fair. Winning feels less about skill and more about getting the right weapons/drugs to show up in the shops at the right times. Fighting both the enemies and the environment itself is a chore. The bugs (the glitch kind, not the enemy insects) can completely destroy a run. Getting to a decent wave count basically requires either finding the one place/technique you can use to cheese the game, or just outright cheating using cheat table.
This game needs polish, a lot of polish. Maybe if the developer tweaks the difficulty to be less about fighting the game and more about fighting the enemies in the game, then the difficulty might become reasonable.
. It also lacks boss fights, and some kind of stat upgrading station which I feel will be necessary if the dev actually intends people to go beyond stage 20.
