E3 2013: Crying, Praying, and LocoCycle

LocoCycle. You may have seen it at the last handful of conferences you've gone to over the past few years, usually shown off only by the full-scale LocoCycle Cycle developer Twisted Pixel made for display in their booth. Yesterday I found a playable version of the game in Microsofts cramped area running on the Xbox One and decided to take LocoCycle for a spin. What I found was a very strange, very odd, and not very well put together experience. Actually...what I saw so far is terrible.

LocoCycle is the story of a sentient experimental motorcycle that has a Mexican mechanic tied to its back wheel. For some reason, even though this bike is eventually doing combo fighting moves and air juggling enemies, this was the hardest thing for me to wrap my mind about. At its core, LocoCycle is about a sentient motorcycle dragging a Mexican man through the desert. I should also mention that the man is screaming and pleading for the bike to stop, but since LocoCycle cannot speak Spanish, she cannot understands the nature of his screams. Instead they're thrust out into the sky, past deaf ears, as he's dragged further down the hot desert roads.

The Lococycle is apparently a heartless beast with the one track mind of a Prozac laden street musician, playing its song of terror for anyone who would listen. And as the darkness falls wherever LocoCycles tires touch earth, the poor Mexican man's family pray each night to a God who can do nothing. A God neutered by the might of LocoCycles wrath.

Ignoring the mechanics pleas only allows LocoCycle to continue with its main assignment. Namely, providing confusing and dull gameplay for the player.

LocoCycles evil knows no end.

And I do mean confusing and dull. LocoCycles tries to be an amalgamation of a motorcycle racer, a shooter and a fighting game. Enemies will come at you from the air and you'll have to jump the bike and throw wheel-punches with the face buttons to pull off combos. The problem is, this fighting system -if you can call it that- isn't very deep and is nowhere near fun. Mainly I found myself simply hitting the same buttons over and over again until the enemies died. There was no true sense that I was pulling off a combo, just that I was hitting B a lot. In other sections LocoCycles tries to be a shooter which basically means you're just shooting cars in front of you until their health bars go down to zero. There are a lot of health bars in this game...and all of them seem to take forever to drain. But that's not all. LocoCycle also has those “race and avoid this obstacles that are in the road at weird angles” section. Or as I like to call it, one of the worst things to be found in video games.

These things might seem bad enough, but LocoCycle also seems to be self aware that its gameplay is tedious because eventually you'll have to do the things above but within a time limit. Defeat these airborn robots! Now defeat these airborn robots in 30 seconds! Shoot these cars! Now shoot these cars within 25 seconds! And if you don't make the time, LocoCycle shuts down for...some reason, and the game is over. The only thing worse than arbitrary gameplay is putting arbitrary time limits on said gameplay to try to make it interesting.

So far LocoCycle is not looking so hot, and is far below anything we would expect from the development team behind The Maw and Splosion Man. I especially don't expect it to sell any Xbox Ones.