Extremely Powerful Capybaras – PS5 Review

Next up with their shot at the autoshooter/roguelite genre is Brazil’s own Studio Bravarda with Extremely Powerful Capybaras. It launched a couple of years ago on the PC back at the height of Vampire Survivors mania and offered its own cuter spin on the genre.

You play as one of the titular capybaras and your task is to fight your way through four stages of the game. Each lasts twenty minutes and culminates in a big boss battle. As is typical with this genre, you control movement with the left stick while the game does the aiming and attacking for you. The only face button control is for a handy little dash move.

Along the way you’ll be attacked by mobs of enemies that constantly move towards you. Contact with them, or any projectiles, causes you damage and so you’ll need to keep moving but as you defeat foes they’ll drop orbs and those will give you experience. Get enough and you’ll level up and will be offered a choice of passive and active abilities. Essentially, buffs and weapons. It’s not quite as simple or intuitive as you’ll be used to though and it can be hard to figure out what’s good and what’s not.

Indeed, it’s that lack of support and information that makes the game a little bit of a puzzle to figure out at first. Abilities aren’t very well described and there are a few elements in the game’s hub that aren’t explained at all.

Instead of the usual permanent power-ups, you’ve got a merchant who allows you to upgrade the abilities that you earn during gameplay. So if there’s a passive that increases your damage, you can make the increase higher on a permanent basis. Likewise, you can also upgrade weapon abilities. That sort of thing. It’s a different way of doing things and, for our money, not the best way as it kind of locks you into the same build run after run, assuming the game offers up the abilities you want.

Another merchant can upgrade each of the game’s classes, giving them better stats across the board, but that’s locked behind a different currency type. The game doesn’t explain that very well but essentially you’ll earn that for completing runs and you can earn more of it by enabling some nasty settings that work against you but give you better rewards.

There are also guys there that do nothing (one talks about statues, another about money). And there’s another guy that unlocks new abilities if you visit him after beating an in-game achievement. But this is all done in a faffy, opaque way. You’ll figure it out but nothing is made easy.   Stuff that could be explained in a line of text isn’t and you’re just left to work it out yourself sometimes.  And all this stuff uses a horrible cursor-led UI which isn’t great either.

But if you can get your head around it all, and figure out what abilities are best (again, the game doesn’t help you at all, there’s no post-game statistics to help you figure out how to tweak your build) you’ll start to eventually make progress.  After that it’s just a case of beating the four levels and this wouldn’t take long at all but you’ll be slowly building up your chances of survival by powering up your favourite abilities. You’ll be crying out for a passive that pulls in experience orbs but you’ll not find it because it doesn’t exist. Bummer.

Overall, there are a few issues with this game. The lack of good, usable information is the main one but it’s the upgrade system that we really didn’t like.

There are passive abilities that are just entirely useless. Each capybara class has ten slots for abilities. Six will take an active ability, leaving four for passives. So why are there upgrades that give you more damage if you’ve got more passives than actives? Why are so many devoted to weaker stats that you’ll never want to upgrade? Why are so many of the active upgrades (your weapons) not very good?  And why is the ‘synergy’ system so unintuitive?  Vampire Survivors already showed everyone how to do it better.

It’s all quite poorly put together in that respect. Sure, the game holds together well and appears to have been made with some degree of love (mostly evident in the game’s well-crafted cartoony art style) but it just lacks that kind of honest third-party playtesting where someone, anyone, needed to say ‘hey this doesn’t make much sense’ or ‘could this be more fun?’

But you will eventually work it all out and after that you’re left with an okay roguelike.  It’s not great and it’s not one of the best in its own limited sub-genre but it’s mostly playable, reasonably fun to look at and it’ll give you a few days of light entertainment.