More Al-crapacrapa Than Alpacapaca
If someone ends up buying Alpacapaca Double Dash, I’d love their opinion on something. At the start of the game, there’s a signpost that states ‘Double Jump A+A’. So, as anyone would, I attempted to double-jump over a chasm and promptly fell in. It happened every time after: a double press of A and no double-jump.
Rather than give up, I pressed on. Something unexpected happened. At no point did Alpacapaca Double Dash require a double-jump. All of the jumps were eminently possible with a single jump. In fact, on many occasions, the ceiling was so low that a double-jump would have been a pain. I dismissed the opening signpost as an oddness, until – by some alignment of the stars – I did a double-jump accidentally. I couldn’t do it again – this was a one-in-a-million shot – and I was left completely bemused.
Double-jump or no double-jump? Let me know if you play it.
A Warning That Something’s Not Right
I’ve described this at length because it’s indicative of something wider with Alpacapaca Double Dash. It is an unpolished mess, which is unusual for a game series that’s on its third iteration (there is an Alpacapaca Dash 1 and Alpacapaca Dash 2, which this game may be a compendium of, but there’s nothing on the internet or press materials to say one way or another).
I will admit to being drawn into Alpacapaca Double Dash for a very old-fogey reason. I had a lot of fun with Jeff Minter’s Llamatron back in the day, so wondered if Alpacapaca Double Dash might be a spiritual successor. Spoiler: it was not.
Instead, Alpacapaca Double Dash is a traditional platformer with a few ideas, but one of them stands separate from the rest. As you gallop through the levels, you will occasionally find gems that can be bottom-bounced to phase into another world. That other world is very much like this one, with the platforms all in the same place, but ghostly blocks are now visible and visible blocks are now ghostly. It’s a puzzle mechanism to get you shifting from one reality to another, and it’s a decent one to base a budget platformer on.
You Can Call Me, You Can Call Me Alpaca
That mechanic does, of course, rely on the platforming being any good, and any good it is not. The biggest problem that Alpacapaca Double Dash faces is that its main character is huge. It near-fills the screen, and that makes any kind of precision bottom-bouncing or leaping across gaps very difficult. If one-third of your body lands on an enemy, do you expect the enemy to die? Or do you expect the alpaca to die? Alpacapaca Double Dash’s answer is that the llama dies, and therein is the problem. It’s difficult to determine what constitutes a ‘good’ jump or a bad one, and it ends up feeling arbitrary.
Alpacapaca Double Dash then puts the alpaca in plenty of situations where the jumping is tight, almost precise. I lost count of the number of times that I was beneath a gap in some blocks and needed to make a controlled exit because an enemy was closing in. But I would hit my head on the blocks, even though I thought I was abiding by the one-third rule. I’d die, and back to the checkpoint I would go.
The alpaca also doesn’t feel good to control. It’s a giant character with a squat jump (natch, maybe I would have liked that double-jump), and he or she can feel dumpy throughout the levels. Alpacapaca Double Dash loves Thwomp-style enemies and spinning blades on patrol routes, but they’re precisely the kind of enemy that this game struggles with. Because you need to duck under them at speed, but you’ve got a giant neck. The collision detection is generous – you can clip your ears on them and still be fine – but it just feels bad to be headbutting everything on the way through.
It’s Just A Phase
The world also doesn’t feel reliable or tactile enough. Alpacapaca Double Dash loves triple-arrows that act as temporary trampolines, disappearing once you’ve used them. But that makes them erratic, as – if you’re activating them from below – they can trigger before you’ve fully ‘landed’ on them, making you rocket up earlier than planned. Enemies have armour or shields, which means you can bottom-bounce them once, land at their feet during their invincibility frames, and then get hit again.
And the bugs. Alpacapaca Double Dash really could have done without layering buggy unreliability on top. The alpaca will get stuck in all sorts of walls and platforms, mainly because it’s a Peter Crouch-style character in a Tom Daley world. At first we found it cute, as the alpaca will often glitch out of the world, and we wondered if we could reach Mario 1-2 style warp pipes. But no, it happens all the time, and there really are no warp pipes.
It really doesn’t matter that there are reality-twisting diamonds in the levels, because Alpacapaca Double Dash doesn’t do a whole lot with them (platforms are there, platforms aren’t there). Plus, there’s always a bug, low ceiling or poor collision detection moment afterwards. It doesn’t matter that there are three ‘books’ in the game with ten levels in each, and quite a few collectibles to find too, because we never truly wanted to explore it all. It doesn’t matter that the art has a late-’80s anime appeal to it, because we spent the game cursing how chunky it is.
A Bug-Filled Mess
I fought an urge to download a ROM of Llamatron. Alpacapaca Double Dash is not what the average person would call good. It’s a little shy of bad, in all honesty, as I’d have stronger words. It’s a clumsy, buggy, garish mess of a platformer, and I wanted to put it down after the first level.
So, heed our warnings and steer clear of Alpacapaca Double Dash. Give it as much distance as you would a real-life alpaca.
Now, all I need to know is what happened to that double-jump.
Important Links
Alpacapaca Double Dash Brings More Alpaca Action To Xbox – https://www.thexboxhub.com/alpacapaca-double-dash-brings-more-alpaca-action-to-xbox/
Buy from the Xbox Store, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alpacapaca-double-dash-xbox-series-xs/9NSQWHFHLRFJ/0010
There’s an Xbox One edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alpacapaca-double-dash-xbox-one/9NP46PFG0LC8/0010
And one for Windows PC – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/alpacapaca-double-dash-windows/9P45VPFXNXDZ/0010
