Taking leaves from the books of Overcooked and Moving Out, CarGo! provides fun, if simpler, chaotic co-op action.
Co-op rage games are fun so long as your group can survive the frustration of one person’s mistake causing a catastrophic balls up for everyone else. Overcooked and Moving Out got it right thanks to their silly themes and constantly interesting levels. CarGo! certainly has the fun theme, but the levels can’t quite offer the same variety that these genre icons can.
In CarGo!, you and your co-op buddies are tasked with delivering goods from location to location, with a goal of selling a product for profit. Make enough profit and you’ll earn stars that will unlock more levels for more silliness. You’ll drive to a venue, pick up an item, and deliver it somewhere else, which is as simple as it sounds until it isn’t.
Everything takes place on a single screen, with you controlling one of up to four vehicles, each of which is able to carry two items. Sometimes things are as simple as taking these individual items to the selling point to earn cash. Other times you’ll need to take them from venue to venue for them to be refined into more complex items to be sold for greater profit. It’s easy enough when an order simply wants you to deliver iron. It’s a little trickier when you need to turn two pieces of iron into tools to then sell. Things get a lot tougher when you have to convert two iron into tools to then deliver them along with wood and glass to manufacture a window that’s then to be sold.
CarGo! does a good job of introducing you to these mechanics, with initial stages just being about selling single items. Things accelerate quickly though, with you needing to ensure every player is managing something to stay on track for big profits. It’s doable enough once everyone has a solid route planned out that can get things where they need to be quickly, but obviously things are never that simple. Roadblocks will appear, randomly blocking paths and forcing you to rethink, often resulting in you crashing into one of your co-op buddies. Draw bridges will raise and lower, opening and closing routes as the short games go on. Police will chase speeding vehicles, locking them in place for a few moments if caught. When you’ve only got three minutes or so, that can be the difference between two and three stars.
This, as you can imagine, is bedlam when you have four players hurtling around the screen, trying to find new routes before inevitably running into each other and arguing over who needs to go where. We found it worked best with two players for this and one other significant reason. As the game progresses, you get some larger maps which become increasingly difficult to keep track of yourself on. Whilst there’s a button to highlight yourself and an indicator to show which way you’re facing, the roads aren’t always easily discernible, and other traffic is frequently unclear.
This is frustrating when routes are suddenly blocked off and you can’t work out which way you’re looking. It’s one of the reasons why the likes of Overcooked work so well. The controls are simple and everything is clearly visible so everything comes down to how you react to the environment changing. The comparisons between it and CarGo! are inevitable, as this clearly wants to occupy the same space, but it lacks some of what makes other genre luminaries stand out.
There’s a lack of creativity here that others have. Overcooked took your kitchen into the sky where you’d manage cooking between two hot air balloons, and Moving Out had you removing all the furniture from a secret underground lab filled with lava. CarGo! has a train blocking the road sometimes. Reduce the map sizes slightly to make things more visually clear, and add some new curveballs. You could have a mech stomp through the town. The power to a supply building could cut out necessitating you driving through a repair machine. A sea monster to slam a tentacle on a road to block the path instead of it just being another roadblock. There are so many unique options that I feel weren’t explored.
With that said, CarGo! is absolutely fun. It hits that “one more round” gland just right when you’re so close to getting three stars but just need to work slightly faster or change who is in charge of what. My daughter particularly liked this one and was keen to go back and retry levels. If you’ve tapped out the genre heavyweights, then CarGo! is certainly a good alternative to play with with your friends.
CarGo! is available now on PC, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.
