SOS OPS! [Review]
S.O.S. What's your emergency? From saving people from a fire to shutting off the power we’ve got you covered! Because we are the SOS OPS! Which is a game developed and published by ArtDock. The game is a ragdoll game reminiscent of games like Human Fall Flat and Gang Beasts in both art style and controls. In SOS OPS! You are fighting against your controls and physics itself to do what you can and save people’s lives! Well, “their lives” might be a bit dramatic. More like fixing some amusement park rides or shutting off the power, but there are some lives to be saved!
When I say you fight against the controls I do mean it. While it’s part of the game to make it more difficult, the controls are awkward and take a bit to get used to. You can only jump with a little hop unless you are running, and climbing is a beast on its own. You can’t climb per se in this game, just grab ledges and lift yourself onto them but you have to move the camera up and down to do so. Even the driving controls are slippery and can get annoying when trying to navigate a big vehicle into a small garage door. It is not my favorite control scheme to be completely honest. But, once getting used to the controls, the real fun begins.
The game has a lot to do without even focusing on the task at hand. While the levels are a bit limited you can explore and just screw around and find things to break! Which is always fun in games like this. Luckily, even though looking for things to break, there didn’t seem to be many things that were broken. One of my teammate’s wardrobes glitched out slightly, with the person flopping around on the screen rather than putting the clothes on. There was a moment when we were trying to fly but two of us grabbed each other and continued to jump. It unfortunately didn’t work.
Other than those we didn’t encounter glitches or breaks. There was a moment where it was a bit difficult to get into a multiplayer game but I don’t think that was a glitch. For some reason, one of my teammates couldn’t join from the tutorial but was able to join from the menu, so it was an easy fix. This is one of those games that is fun to just run and jump around and try to break as many things as it will allow you to. It makes me wish you had proper access to the city and could leave your OPS base and explore a bit. It doesn’t even have to be some sort of hub-world, just walking around would be entertaining enough.
While the city location was interesting, my personal favorite was the amusement park. There was just so much to do and see at that level. Though to be honest, I have no clue how you are ever supposed to finish that level within the time limit. Luckily the timer is only for stars and doesn’t affect whether or not you finish the level. But, there were three of us all doing different tasks at once and it still took us like half an hour on that level. We decided that the stars would be too difficult and just focused on taking our time and messing around. This level did have a frustrating part with the crossbow, it’s very hard to aim it properly, and it took two people for us to do it. One person held the crossbow and used the other player’s screen to see its movement (since they couldn’t move the camera without moving the crossbow) while the other person loaded and launched it. The method worked but I really can’t imagine playing this game alone. At the very least the end of the level rewarded us with bumper cars that we did spend some time to mess around with.
This game has quite a few frustrating moments like that. There’s another one close to the end of the power plant level. You have to shut the power off and to do that you have to jump onto this obnoxiously large lever by jumping up boxes. This game just does not have the type of controls to be jumping and climbing up something like that. There are also these buttons that you have to press in order and if you mess it up it resets. This is reused again later but as levers instead. It just feels like an arbitrary way to make the levels longer and I don’t generally like things like that. Especially in this game where the levels are already long and do not need any sort of padding to be even longer.You can tell that the people who made the game did try this one and had fun with it. There are references, easter eggs, and little details everywhere. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make up for janky controls and forced padding.
SOS OPS is a fun game to play with friends but I would never recommend playing it alone. To be honest I don’t think the game would be fun or even good playing it by yourself. The effort that was put into this game did make me appreciate it more but in the end, the game isn’t inherently unique and there are plenty of games that come out nowadays like this one. The most fun this game has to offer is just messing around, the actual gameplay itself is lacking. I wasn’t a huge fan of this game. Fortunately my colleagues loved playing it and I did have a lot of fun playing it with them. This game is available on Steam.
