Game Reviews

Cargo King

Star onStar onStar onStar offStar off
|
iOS
| Cargo King
Get
Cargo King
|
iOS
| Cargo King

Whether you're young or old, there's a joy to simply stacking stuff up.

It's the mixture of building something impressive whilst simultaneously knowing that at some point physics are going to take over and end it all.

Two urges, creative and destructive, sated with one simple activity.

So when we say that Cargo King is about stacking stuff up, and not a lot else, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Get a load of this

Each game starts with a crane zipping into view above a colourful flat-bed truck. Pressing the screen will cause it to drop its load: a single wooden cargo box.

What's in that box isn't important. The fact that another box is on the way - from either the left or right hand side of the screen - is.

When that second box arrives, you have to drop it as neatly on top of the first as possible. The third is the same, albeit a little trickier depending on how well you did with the second.

And so on, and so on, until the whole teetering stack collapses under its own impossible dimensions.

Stack flow

You get one chance to make a mistake, which leads to a nice rewind effect, and then you're down to limited continues, which can be restocked though IAPs.

We said at the outset that the simplicity of this format wasn't such a bad thing, but Cargo King would be a lot more interesting if it chanced a little embellishment.

For example, there's a match three bonus element when you combine three boxes containing the same thing, but as you have no control over the order these are dropped in, this is entirely random.

With some kind of control over box order, or multiple stacks so you could choose where the next box landed, this could have been a far more interesting addition.

Cargo King is a nice, cleanly presented casual physics puzzler that doesn't demand much of its players. But you can't help but think it'd be much better if it demanded more.

Cargo King

A nicely presented casual physics puzzler that would benefit from stacking up a few more layers of complexity
Score
Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.