Captive: Final Rating

Captive

United Kingdom

Antony Crowther (designer), Mindscape (publisher)

Released 1990 for Amiga and Atari ST; 1992 for DOS

Date Started: 10 August 2014
Date Ended: 8 September 2014

Total Hours: 42

Difficulty: Hard (4/5)
Final Rating: 36
Ranking at Time of Posting: 109/158 (69%)
Ranking at Game # 431: 322/431 (75%)

Even bad games often have an enjoyable "hook." With Captive, for me, it was the satisfying combination of a burst of blood and an audible clack that accompanies each enemy's death. You get no indication of hit points or damage levels until an enemy dies, so it's almost always something of a surprise when it happens, especially when you've just spent a few minutes engaging the foe in the deadly side-step-turn dance in which one mistyped key can be fatal.

It's no secret that I didn't care for Captive--didn't hate it, just didn't care for it--but there are several ways in which I admire the game, starting with the one above. In few games is seeing an enemy die so satisfying. Another is in the programming that must have gone into the procedural dungeon creation. While this results in dungeon layouts that are overly linear and a bit bland, it's still pretty cool. The complex rules that must have gone into the procedure--no shops too soon, release buttons must always follow closing walls, enemies with clipboards must always precede computers or puzzle doors--execute flawlessly.

The procedural generation also results in a few oddities, however. First, there is no "final battle" in each base--no "big bad" or unique enemy. Given how difficult I found the combats, this was somewhat merciful but also somewhat bland from a story perspective. As we've discussed in the comments, it also means that the puzzles can only be of the most rote sort, such as password-protected computers preceded with clipboards that tell you the password. When generating random dungeons, it's harder (impossible?) to create crafted puzzles that require complex maneuvering, testing, or logical inference, such as Dungeon Master's pressure-plate puzzles or Might & Magic's wall messages.

The puzzles get slightly more complicated as the game goes on, but they always involve a clipboard that tells you the exact answer.

  
Captive is rightly famous for being the game that never ends. When you finish each mission, you're given the option to continue to the next one, and the whole process starts over. Technically, this process does have an "end," but even the low mission limit on the PC version (256) would take thousands of hours to complete--I estimate about three times as long as every other game I've played as part of this blog--and I would be filled with despair if anyone told me they'd done that. Since your droids continue to get better while the enemy doesn't (you encounter every enemy type in the first mission), it must eventually get boring.

I've been criticized for playing Captive "wrong," by not upgrading weapons fast enough. I maintain that taking this approach is hampered by a) always needing to keep enough cash to repair droids; b) the fact that only like one shop in each base sells weapons; and c) the game documentation not making it clear that the next class of weapons is always a good thing (although this can admittedly be determined with the "AG Scan" device). Contrast this with, say, Fallout: New Vegas, where a player using a handgun at a high skill is going to be more effective than a player using a machine gun at a low skill. 

But I also allow that my own RPG tendencies did hamper my progress. For instance, I have an aversion to purchasing equipment in a game that offers it for free. It's much more satisfying to loot a helm +2 from a dead orc captain than to purchase it in a shop. Since Captive offers copious found melee weapons, super balls, and handguns until all but the final levels, I tended to equip those rather than purchase expensive-but-better weapons in the stores. I also have a weird tendency to try to diversify the types of weapons I equip, perhaps ingrained by RPGs where enemies have weaknesses to different weapon types (which is not the case in Captive). Fallout: New Vegas offers the ability to break down ammo and use the resulting powder and lead to reload empty cartridges, meaning that if you want to go through the entire game with just a .45 pistol, you can still make use of the other handgun ammo that you find. Despite this, I insist on toting around a weapon that makes use of every type of ammo in the game, switching between them as I run out, ensuring that eventually I'll be taking on a swarm of deathclaws with a BB gun--a situation not so different than showing up in the final levels of Captive with magnums. Even after I understood how Captive worked, I insisted on replacing my superior laser pistols with "zlot" shotguns that I'd found, just to diversify my weapon selection.

Note that in this late game shot, I've replaced two of my lasers with inferior "zlot" shotguns just because, I don't know, they were free.

  
Nonetheless, even doing everything "right," I'd have to ding the game a bit for difficulty. Enemies encountered on the final levels are capable of blasting the droids to scrap, in just a couple of shots, even with upgraded parts and all shields blazing. Repairing droids is so expensive that you're essentially forced to play like a jackass--reloading every time you take significant damage, not just when you die--so you don't go broke and lack the ability to purchase the weapons and ammo that are so important. Yes, pushing through the final base with no weapons until I finally found a shop was satisfying, but it was one moment of satisfaction after endless hours of frustration.

Ultimately, my ambivalent feelings about Captive boil down to it not having enough of the elements that I truly enjoy about RPGs, something that I think will be reflected in the GIMLET:

1. Game World. A missed opportunity. Captive is nominally a sci-fi game that takes place in space, but it really feels more like a standard high fantasy game with sci-fi textures (the same way that Don't Go Alone felt like a standard fantasy game with horror textures). The framing story is essentially unnecessary and its conclusion confusing and uninteresting. In this, I must admit, it captures the spirit of other Dungeon Master clones perfectly. Score: 3. 

The space parts of the game were just time-fillers. They didn't in any way seem to be about traveling through space.

2. Character Creation and Development. "Creation" is limited to assigning names to the droids, which oddly determines their starting attributes. "Development" throughout the game is unsophisticated but still somewhat satisfying, as you spend experience points on skills and get random attribute increases every time you do so. Skill levels not only increase proficiency but unlock new weapons and armor.  It was nice to let a couple hours go by and suddenly realize I had 8,000 experience points to spend. On the downside, there are absolutely no role-playing opportunities, and development stalls in the last couple of bases, when you get paltry rewards for slaying difficult creatures and each new skill purchase costs thousands of points. Score: 4.

One character towards the game's end. I never got to use a "spaygun," and I'm not sure I even want to know what it does.

3. NPC Interaction. There are, alas, no NPCs. Turning the shopkeepers into NPCs would have significantly improved the game, as I'll discuss below. Score: 0.

4. Encounters and Foes. Captive has a variety of foes original to the game, though some clearly based on pop-culture references like Go-bots, Robocop, and Critters. Moreover, they are well-distinguished in power and attributes, such as whether they can shoot missile weapons, what types of damage they do (fire vs. physical), the speed they move, their relative hit points, and whether they can fly. These various characteristics determine the strategies you need to employ to defeat them, which is as it should be. There are no other satisfying "encounters" in the game, with all of its "puzzles" somewhat sophomoric and no role-playing choices. Some level of respawning would also have been welcome, to compensate for poor skill and money selections. Score: 4.

Didn't quite close that door fast enough.

  
5. Magic and Combat. I have to give Captive a lot of credit for being among a small number of games in which the player really makes use of the physical environment in combat. Between leading enemies in a "fighting retreat" along long corridors, smashing them with doors, laying mines, tricking them into shooting each other, freezing them in place by flooding rooms, and a variety of other tactics I outlined a few days ago, there are a lot of ways for the under-equipped player to (very slowly) whittle down the enemies. I maintain that for most of the game, you essentially must do these things to avoid taking too much damage.

The rest of combat was a little less interesting to me. The game offers Dungeon Master's basic mechanics but without the special attacks and magic system that allowed you to fine-tune attacks and defenses. And in general, I don't like real-time combat unless it's a bit more forgiving. I'm old and clumsy. Score: 5.

6. Equipment. In my opinion, the game's best category. Between weapons, armor (droid parts), devices and optics with special uses, cameras, and mines, you have a lot of options for outfitting characters. This game is (I think) tied with The Keys to Maramon to offer the first mines in RPG history, and I don't recall any previous game offering something as sophisticated as cameras that let you spy on what's happening in other parts of the dungeon--and to detonate them when an enemy approaches. I also liked that you could find limited-use versions of most weapons ("zlots") throughout the game. Considerations of weight (more weight saps more power) and item damage also added to the game's strategy.

Captive leaves it entirely up to the player to figure out what each of the items does and how it works. For instance, you have to purchase and test each "dev-scape" and "optic" to figure out its use, and even then it can be somewhat obscure (does the "Power Sapper" do anything but drain power?). To understand damage levels of each weapon, you have to run the "AG Scan" optic. I don't know any way to determine what ammo each weapon uses without just buying it and trying to reload. While in other games, I might appreciate the extra challenge afforded by all this experimentation, I generally felt Captive was challenging enough. Score: 6.

A late-game inventory illustrates some of the game's diverse equipment, including a dagger, a rifle, a shield, a die (to figure out door combinations), several clipboards with passwords, a battery, gold, three cameras, and several types of melee weapons and handguns.

7. Economy. Well, unlike many games, gold in Captive--as nonsensical as it is--remains valuable all the way to the end of the game, what with the constant need for upgrades, repairs, and ammo-refills. Because I was always on the verge of being broke, I didn't even fully experience all of the devices, weapons, and parts the game had to offer--perhaps the most compelling reason to continue on to Mission #2. Other than that, the economy isn't very sophisticated, and I didn't care for the fact that it was a closed system (since there are no random encounters), nor that you couldn't sell back unneeded ammo or zlots. Score: 5.

8. Quests. The game has a main quest, but it's so bereft of any real story or information that it's hard to regard it as much of anything. Even the final "choice"--whether to end the game with Trill's liberation or let him be re-captured and go on another mission--doesn't really make any sense thematically. No side-quests, no role-playing, not even the satisfaction of a real ending. Score: 2.

9. Graphics, Sound, and Inputs. I found the graphics reasonably good for the era--certainly above the "not distractingly bad" threshold I set for full score. Sound is about as good as you might expect for the era, and I definitely found gameplay enhanced with the sound turned on. I liked that the game had redundant mouse/keyboard controls for most things; didn't like that it didn't have keyboard controls for combat actions. Score: 5.

10. Gameplay. I would characterize it as very linear, overly hard, not very replayable, and too long even for the first mission. The ability to keep playing as long as you want is, I suppose, a "good" thing if you like the game, but for me every base offers the same bland experience punctuated with the occasional thrill of dispatching a particularly difficult foe. This is not enough to sustain the 10 bases that the first mission requires, let alone unlimited additional missions. Score: 2.

The final score of 36 puts it just above my "recommended" threshold. I think Captive could have elevated itself to something I truly enjoyed with just a little additional effort, such as a few dialogue options with the shopkeepers offering tips on equipment and foes, a few fixed encounters interspersed with the procedural dungeon creation (would it have been so hard to plug them in for the first mission, at least?), maybe a text screen at the end of each mission, or with each computer hack, that revealed a bit more about Trill and his crimes. Heck, if this story had been any good, I might have been tempted to go on to the second mission just to continue fleshing it out.

Players that don't care much about plots, NPCs, and role-playing choices would probably scale the score up to an equivalent of a 50. I understand if you're one of those players, and I admit the game's mechanics are good for what it does, but even you have to admit that a game purely about mechanics is not what people generally think about when you say "RPG."

MobyGames's review round-up shows that contemporary reviews were all over the place, ranging from 44/100 to 94/100, but each notes its Dungeon Master heritage and suggest that the game appeals most to fans of Dungeon Master-style games, with which I agree if what you like most about Dungeon Master is the real-time combat mechanics.

I always try, often unsuccessfully, to separate my personal enjoyment of a game from my admiration of the development. I didn't like Keef the Thief much, but I thought it was an impressive effort for a couple of teenaged developers. In this case, I think 25-year-old author Antony Crowther deserves a lot of credit for designing the game by himself (apparently after his brother, a Dungeon Master fan, suggested it) in an era in which most single-developer games feel like throwbacks to the early 1980s.

Crowther had been building up experience prior to Captive, as a developer of minor arcade-style games like Bat Attack (1983) and Zig-Zag (1987) and a programmer on several Starlight Software titles like Deathscape (1987) and Dogfight 2187 (1987). Since Captive, he's continued to be active in the gaming field, working most recently for Electronic Arts on the Harry Potter series. His LinkedIn profile currently shows him as a "Technical Consultant" at Sumo Digital, a UK-based game company that seems to specialize in board, sports, and fitness games.

In 1993, while still working for Mindscape, Crowther wrote Liberation: Captive II with a much bigger team. Judging by the screenshots, its a very different game, preserving some of the first game's elements (like a party of four droids and associated equipment) but set in a much less linear world and featuring an actual story. I look forward to giving it a try. We'll encounter Crowther again before then, however, with Knightmare (1991), based on a British children's show, which appears to be yet another Dungeon Master clone but with a simpler interface than Captive.

For now I return to Secret of the Silver Blades, a game so different from Captive that we must marvel that they're considered part of the same genre.