Capes is an extremely fun game, and I want to clarify and recontextualize the issue I see many players find with skill progression. After discussing the issue, I provided a standard, and brief, review of the game.

I believe the issue is a fundamental disconnect between the way players have been conditioned to approach games and the way Capes encourages us to engage with it's gameplay and progression system.

As characters level, more of their skills and skill upgrades become available for purchase. The resource (SP/Skill Points) needed to purchase upgrades, however, is obtained by completing the mission and secondary objectives. Each level has several secondary objectives that offer a significant amount of SP.

The issue many players seem to have is that progression feels gated behind secondary objectives. I ultimately think this is due to player mentality. We have been conditioned by so many other games to accomplishing everything all at once in one level, and this mentality causes us to frequently reload or restart the levels we are playing. In other games, you need to hit those secondary or optional objectives because they are tied to other things, be that additional experience points, new weapons or abilities, story elements and ending options, or just a sense of accomplishment for the player. If we miss those objectives, we are losing out on something, and this feels exacerbated in Capes because that's a lot of progression potential.

Capes acknowledges this and encourages players to come back to challenging levels later to fully complete the secondary objectives after their characters have obtained some upgrades. For example, one stage on a rooftop requires you to knock 10 enemies off the roof. The first time I tried this level, I only had a few abilities that could knock enemies back, so I wasn't able complete this objective and lost access to the two SP the objective offered. I came back later with a different roster of characters, a few more knockback abilities, and I was able to complete the secondary objective.

This design fundamentally clashes with the way we are used to engaging with games. I could have constantly reloaded or restarted the level to try, in vain, to knock the required number of enemies off the roof, but that would have been more time consuming than simply replaying the level later.

Ultimately, Capes encourages us to engage with our time and gameplay differently than other games. At the time of writing, I have only had to return to one or two stages, and I have delayed playing one stage early on because it required use of an ability I hadn't purchased yet. Mission objectives are displayed at level select, so you know what you will need to do before entering a mission.

Instead of sometimes bashing our heads against the wall like we do with other games, Capes asks players to engage with the game less strenuously. Level completion and character progression are at lower stakes than we are used to, and this mismatch between our mentality and the game's expectations can result in frustration.

Overall, I am very happy with my purchase. I'm not far enough in to say whether or not it has enough content to justify the forty dollars, but I am very happy with the twenty dollar I paid. The gameplay is fantastic, the story is okay (I find that there is a significant tone discrepancy between the characters' quippiness and the dark setting they are in--imagine a grim DCU setting populated with the quippy cast of the MCU), and the voice acting ranges from great to pretty bad. As other reviews have pointed out, there does seem to be an emptiness between missions. The group's hideout is a base that was abandoned 20 years ago when the heroes were killed, so there could totally be some XCOM-like base buildin. I don't fnd this to be a problem since the gameplay is so good, but there is definitely a feeling of absence. You can read about the other characters and the setting, and you can even unlock short dialogs between characters as you play through, so it isn't entirely empty.