Cargo Commander Reviews

I wish I could launch this game into space. (I also wish I could give a neutral review) Cargo Commander is a pretty straightforward title. You play as a guy who's stranded in space with the job of salvaging cargo from random other ships that collide with yours. In said ships you'll find a bunch of random cargo, enemies, weapons and pickups. And that's it. That's the game. You basically rinse and repeat the same loop albeit changing up what boxes show up via enterring random coordinate names or using prexisting ones (Word of warning, the game has no censor so expect to see things like the N word and such). As you go through different systems you'll pick up different cargo (Though all are just blue boxes) which will let you level up to get new stuff in your ship or free upgrades to start with. The game has four weapons and you start with one but can hold two and those have upgrades. All upgrades except the ones you've ranked up with are lost between days or deaths. The biggest problem this game has is in its lack of content. After your first 30 minutes to an hour you've seen everything the game has to offer. It never goes anywhere and nothing really changes enough. The upgrades are basic and there's not enough enemy variety, cargo variety, layout variety or otherwise to really flesh out the games runtime. The game is also rather buggy with enemies failing to die, getting trapped in physics objects or hits not detecting properly which can add to the frustration of the game. Though the must frustrating thing is the homebases music which loves to turn itself back on all the time and it's just so tiresome. In concept the game is good and it could be interesting were it to provide more variety in terms of chambers, extracting loot, enemy types and weapon types as well as different progression. It could be good but it's just not really worth playing overall unfortunately.

I decided to revisit this gem and 100% it for the release of Death Stranding 2. As of now I have five minutes until it unlocks. Cargo Commander is a pretty uncomplicated but fun game. There's a lot of types of cargo containers to go through, a nice variety of weapons that serve their purposes (maglauncher and revolver is best), and two brilliant songs to go by. What makes this game well worth the hours and days and years of grinding to the point I revisited this a decade later is the hostile loneliness you're constantly assaulted with. You can find letters that you write to your son and wife... which means they never got them. You get emails of how your son is going but you don't have the capacity to reply. You hate this job. You hate risking your life. You hate that you're finding corpses of poor saps just like you. But you do it. You do it for him. You push yourself to succeed so he'll send you another award-winning picture you'll set above your bed so it'll be the first and last thing you see every work day. You stick with this meaningless corporate existence for his sake, and so that you'll be half the man he believes you to be. To play this is fun but to complete this is a challenge in perseverance. Only when you get all of his pictures and clear all objectives can you go home a hero, and a father.