TL;DR for Harpagun
(played on a Meta Quest 3 128 GB model)
| Pros | Cons |
| + Exciting core combat | – Easy misinputs interrupt the action |
| + Excellent music | |
| + Stylish visuals |
INTRODUCTION
They say once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence; three times is a pattern.
And if that’s true, then Polish studio Something Random has developed a pattern of building great games.
After wetting their beak on an unfathomably fun game-jam experiment called Super Hot—and then spending years wading around in the success of that series across titles of hardly varying names and vastly varying hardware ports (including floppy disc)—the team behind the de facto show-your-friends-VR title are proving that it’s not a fluke.
Something Random is at three for three: the Superhots, Toy Trains, and now Harpagun.
STORY
Harpagun puts you in the bast shoes of a Soviet-coded grunt, hustling through the dangers of interplanetary resource extraction.
Things go awry, and you’ve got to rendezvous with the rest of your ground crew and get off-planet before the pseudo-vegetal alien octoroks that live there turn you into fertilizer.
Your superiors float in a mothership in the upper atmosphere and give you intel through your comms device. Why they don’t bring the mothership down to assist in the rescue mission is unclear, but much of the lore is unclear and that’s okay.
You don’t get any cringey, lore-dumping exposition like “as you know, you’re on so-and-so planet and you’ll need to use your weapons like this to escape.”
No awkwardly stating the obvious, thankfully.
Instead, your superiors give exposition only to those things that are exigently discovered, quipping, cheering, and coaxing in a way that feels at home in this vibrant cel-shaded world.
The dialogue isn’t literary greatness or gut-busting comedy, but it’s a flavourful, immersive, and welcome route into the world; a world formed piecemeal out of exploration.
Bit by bit we see more of what this once-great civilization was like through its alien-infested ruins and the reactions those ruins evoke out of our betters.
The story is pretty well just there to adorn the mood and lend a hand to the aesthetic.
In this, we see how Something Random consistently focuses on pairing their core gameplay loops with appropriate aesthetics, and then skillfully steering the remaining game elements to those thematic ends.
GAMEPLAY
Harpagun is a semi-on-rails shooter with a couple of core mechanics you’ve probably never seen before.
The first and most obvious standout is its dual tractor beams.
Rocking up to swarms of aliens with tractor beam fists and yeeting them hundreds of feet into the air is full on, dude.
It’s big boy beat-em-up style buff baddy stuff, buddy.
It’s also a really cool and intuitive evolution of the now-standard use of the lower trigger as a force-grab button.
Smash enemies into each other or into the ground!
Block projectiles with them!
Tear off an enemy’s arm and shoot it through another enemy!
This simple system combos well with the game’s classic shooter combat, leading to lots of fun and chaotic emergent gameplay.
The other standout mechanic is Harpagun’s movement system.
Now this one’s a bit understated compared to the huge, ragdoll-swinging energy tentacles bolted onto your arms. But I think it’s actually more innovative, and—subtly—contributes more to the combat.
Instead of moving freely, you carry a handful of short-distance warp points that assemble into your path, the last in the back of the line cycling to the front as you move forward.
When you encounter more serious combat sections, the warp points switch from linear to multidirectional, letting you dash and strafe around the battlefield to avoid enemies and projectiles.
The concept is strong and it’s satisfying when it works.
You’re a slavic, blue-collar Albert Wesker, tearing up a violent world and whipping it back at itself.
But I found about ten percent of the time or so, my inputs would do something different than expected. The angle of my head was—I guess—rotated too far from where my right thumbstick deemed the ‘front’ of my character to be (or something like that)?
So I’d zip off in the wrong direction, or worse, stay totally still.
Either way I’d often end up with a face full of seed.Either way I’d often end up taking damage.
Pacing is solid, and enemy variety is okay.
But by the end of my early access playthrough I was eager for more.
Is that good? Is that bad?
Hard to say.
But, if like me, you want more Harpagun—well—lucky us!
They’ve stuffed an arena mode in here as well for competitive nerds to fight for a high score!
I know that somehow creative kills net you more points, but those points show up on top of the distant corpses of fresh-dead enemies in the midst of a chaotic shootout, so it’s hard to tell what’s optimal (and that makes my monotropic min-maxer mind mald).
PRESENTATION
This game is beautiful.
Harpagun takes the approach of some of the best titles of the Wii era, making up for the shortcomings of the hardware with cel shading and distinct style.
When your health gets low, you enter into “Predator vision”, a state where everything but enemies and important interactables gray out into the background.
It’s a clever way to let you know to lock in for make or break time.
And sound-wise?
Ohhhhhh, it’s nice.
Real nice.
Sound effects and voice acting are above par.
But the music?
Oh baby, it’s jazzy! It’s lively! It’s dynamic!
And then you explore an underground ruin full of cosmic horrors and all of a sudden it’s a Gregorian choir heralding your impending doom!
It’s salty. It’s sweet. And somehow the fusion doesn’t spoil the meal.
I searched around the internet for hours trying to find out who did the music for this game before I remembered that the game itself probably has a credits section.
It turns out the artist (Or band? Duo?) doesn’t have any other music that sounds like this stuff and—at time of writing—they haven’t uploaded the Harpagun OST yet.
These guys also did the music for Something Random’s last title, Toy Trains, and they knocked it out of the park there too. But man what a vibe switch!
It’s really something remarkable to see a studio and a musical outfit that both have such a breadth of style and capacity for artistic execution.
Whether it’s a matrix-style violent meta-narrative, a prolonged trip to grandpa’s house to play with the train set, or an alien world of cartoonish mayhem, Something Random fleshes out a fun conceit and builds on it – despite how entirely different it may be from what they’ve done before.
The boldness to try so many different genres—as well as the talent to see them through to such a high level—ought to be acknowledged both for the games of Something Random and for the music of BT Loops.
As a creative of any medium, it’s all too easy to just stick to one genre once you get good at it and never branch out to more.
VERDICT
On a spectrum between the poles of ‘unfinished’ and ‘perfectly polished’—even in early access—I’d poll these Poles’ product toward the polished pole.
While not entirely bug-free, Harpagun is already above industry-standard for a new release, nevermind an early access title.
The game comes packed with all the options I want as a player, and some additional quality-of-life perks like a graphics-to-performance slider and a one-button way to recenter yourself in-world.
It’s not perfect.
Sometimes your tractor beam will get stuck in a wall or snap to the wrong thing.
Sometimes your comms device will get in your way in the middle of action.
But overall, Harpagun lives up to its name, weaving well its composite elements into a complete package of frenetic fun.
And if their past care tending to titles post-release is any indication of how the studio will treat Harpagun, then I feel confident in saying that its current 8/10 is lower than where it will end up.
Hyper-Objective Omniscient Evaluation Yardstick
Scores are out of 10, where 10 is a masterpiece, 1 is unplayable, and 5 is just average.
Gameplay has a heavier weighting toward the overall score.
Gameplay – 8
Graphics – 8
Immersion – 8
Replayability – 8
Performance – 9
Sound – 10
Image / video credit: Auganix (unless otherwise stated)
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About the author
Kierkegaard once said that the artist is like one stuck inside Phalaris' brass bull, which burned up its victims and—due to the formation of its apertures—made beautiful music from their anguish.
The critic, he said, is just like the artist except he doesn't have the anguish in his heart nor the music on his lips.
A lifelong gamer based out of Vancouver, Pelé disagrees with Kierkegaard.