What begins as an absurd, colourful cartoon romp eventually devolves into the most tedious of tired videogame conventions. That said, the inclusion of Steam Workshop functionality means that absurd user created content should extend Octodad’s lifespan past its short 2-3 hour playtime as long as the community is there to support it.The amount of fun to be had with Octodad: Dadliest Catch is inverse to the amount of time spent playing it. Arguably, this is for the best as the game no doubt loses all its appeal once it becomes playable, but at the current price point of £14.99 I felt a bit short-changed. The game is stupidly short for its current price: just as I got into the flow of the thing, coordinating my body so I could slip past tasks, it was over. Most of these flaws fade into the background though, as the game is all about the physics engine, which only becomes more amusing the more broken it is. The graphics look old and the soundtrack is dull - a disappointment considering Octodad’s catchy title track (‘Who’s that man in the three piece suit?’). Bits of humour add to your fumbling antics and the whole thing is very tongue-in-cheek, but punchlines are often killed by bad timing. Asking the player to carry out tasks that require precision seems like the dumbest of design choices when you based your game on imprecision. In these more prescribed and gamefied situations the ungainly controls play against you. Later on you are sporadically pursued by the angry chef of dubious accent, who will force a number of situations where you have to either run away at speed or sneak. Less funny is when things get more 'gamey'. Garden chores, grocery shopping and making coffee are the funniest as you cause complete chaos, trashing the entire house while family and neighbours look on. Octodad plays best when you're doing the mundane. Simply negotiating around the garden with a lawnmower will result in hilarity, shouting, throttling and your wife’s decimated flower bed. The amount of coordination and teamwork required means it should be used by corporations for team building exercises. In co-op you can split control of the limbs, making for a game that will bring you and your friend closer together while instantaneously causing lifelong rifts. In a game based on awkward controls, add local co-op and you just double, triple and treble the fun. That said, there were occasions where I just had to turn the game off and come back to it later, so infuriating was it in places. For the most part, I was in stitches - attempting to walk down the aisle while trying (and failing) not to knock down every precariously balanced pillar and vase is the closest our genre will ever get to slapstick comedy (if we discount your nan playing Wii). Of course, things rarely get ‘done’ and in reality your limbs will be flying around spasmodically you'll find yourself lurching up stairs like a man mid-seizure and incessantly picking up the wrong item while sending every other object in the room flying, in what will be a Marmite division of either hilarity or pure frustration.
The whole process of keeping your cephalopod nature shtum is, of course, made difficult by painfully awkward controls: you move each limb separately by holding down the appropriate button and you have to try and coordinate your actions in order to get things done. He's the only one that sees through your pitifully thin disguise) sushi chef. Octodad is a physics-based adventure/puzzler in which you play an octopus trying to pass himself off as an average Joe-human, keeping his family in the dark and completing day-to-day chores, all while hiding his gangly, chaotic eight legs and avoiding an insane (well.
Standing tall (or should that be: leaning awkwardly and slightly to the left, while jiggling intermittently) alongside titles such as Surgeon Simulator 2013 and QWOP, in a fast forming genre I want to call the awkward-em-up, Octodad: Dadliest Catch takes an aspect of gaming that can sink a title, bad controls, and makes it. Reviews // 19th Feb 2014 - 9 years ago // By Matt Young Octodad: Dadliest Catch Review