Developer: Coatsink
Publisher: Moonshine Studios, Coatsink
Platform: Switch
Tested on: Switch
Get Packed: Couch Chaos – Review
Don’t let Get Packed: Couch Chaos’ subtitle deceive you: the Switch version of developer Coatsink’s furniture moving game isn’t a completely new entry in the Get Packed franchise, but a rerelease of Get Packed: Fully Loaded, which we looked at before. Granted, new content was added, and there is something that can be said about simply handing your friends a Joy-Con for some multiplayer mayhem, but will that be enough to double dip or should you stick to the previous release? Read on to find out!
Story
You wouldn’t necessarily expect what is essentially a party game to have a fleshed out story, but some genuine effort was put into fleshing out Get Packed’s premise. The game takes place in a quaint little town named Ditchlington, which has just been purchased by the greedy Salt Corporation. This thinly veiled parody of corporate greed aims to turn the town into a mine and evicts all of its inhabitants. Enter Last Ditch Removals, a newly formed company of enthusiastic (or should that be opportunistic) moving experts that are seeking to make a quick buck on the back of Ditchlington’s citizens’ misfortune. The initial setup sounds incredibly cynical, but before you start asking yourself whether Last Ditch Removals’ employees are the bad guys, don’t worry: Salt Corporation eventually gets its comeuppance and there is a happy ending involved.
Graphics
While the art design for Get Packed is decent enough, the game didn’t quite survive the transition to the Switch unscathed. We weren’t entirely convinced of the visuals back when we reviewed the game on PC and this downscaled version isn’t doing the title any favours. The visuals look blurry, and to make matters worse, everything feels zoomed out way too much, affecting gameplay. Get Packed feels nigh unplayable in handheld mode or tabletop mode, as you’ll be squinting just to see what’s going on. If you happen to own a Switch Lite, we’re going to tell you to simply skip the game outright. Things fare better when playing on a TV, but a bigger screen means that the lack of detail becomes very obvious and this only highlights how poorly optimised the visuals are.
Sound
There isn’t a whole lot that we can say about Get Packed’s soundscape apart from that it’s serviceable. In all honesty, this doesn’t really matter as you’ll be too focused on actually performing the tasks the game requires to actually listen to the music. If you’re playing with friends, you’ll find that the tunes playing in the background will be drowned out by frantic talking and yelling too, so we didn’t feel like we were really missing anything in terms of audio.
Gameplay
There is a double meaning to the word ‘couch’ in Couch Chaos, as it not only refers to the furniture that you’re supposed to move, but also to couch co-op, as this is a party game first and foremost, which doesn’t really shine unless you can get some friends together to experience Get Packed’s chaotic gameplay. Your goal is to carefully remove furniture -and occasionally even living creatures such as pets- from a building and move it into your company truck. This is easier said than done as the game makes use of ragdoll physics and there is a time limit involved, as well as a cash goal you need to reach in order to clear a level. Successfully moving the requested pieces of furniture into the truck earns you cash. However, whenever you cause damage, you’ll lose some money, so earning the maximum amount of money is something that is unlikely to happen, as it’s almost impossible not to break anything while you’re flailing around with a chair or a plant.
The various scenarios start out normal enough, playing out as you’d expect in a game that is about moving furniture out of a house, but things escalate quickly and soon enough you’ll be salvaging alien technology from a crashed UFO or robbing a bank. There is a tongue-in-cheek factor present here, and the zany situations that the employees find themselves in are a major reason why you’d keep playing as they are filled with cutesy references and hidden jokes. If only the same could be said about the physics-based gameplay, which is, unfortunately, more frustrating than fun. Now, the chaotic gameplay does come into its own when you’re playing together with friends, as the shared frustration quickly turns into yelling matches -in a good way. However, there is very little reason to play Get Packed: Couch Chaos as a solo title, as the game quickly loses its luster when you’re simply getting annoyed at the awkward controls and there is nobody else to blame in the room when you screw up.
Just like in the previous release, there isn’t an in-depth explanation of the mechanics present here, barring a very basic tutorial. Getting to grips with the game’s trickier mechanics relies on trial and error instead. There are specific objectives that you need to achieve in order to clear a stage and we noticed that the game doesn’t always let you think outside the box or brute force your way through challenges in different ways from what the developers had in mind, which did stifle our creativity a bit. You’ll simply need to tick the boxes of the objectives that you need to complete, and a little more freedom would have been welcome here, especially since you can clear the campaign in under two hours if you only aim for the minimum rating in each stage. In addition to this fairly short experience, which we already saw last year in Get Packed: Fully Loaded, Couch Chaos presents us with a handful of new content, mostly consisting of minigames that put a spin on the physics-based gameplay. The majority of these are sports-based, including a bowling and a soccer variant, although there is also a Luigi’s Mansion-esque game where you’ll need to use a vacuum cleaner to suck up ghosts. These do add some much-needed longevity to the game, which makes sense because of how short the main campaign is, unless you’re desperate to achieve the maximum score in every stage. However, there are much better uses of your time, in our humble opinion.
Conclusion
The cutesy premise and quirky scenarios are fun enough, but the frustrating gameplay makes for a game that isn’t worth picking up if you’re looking for a good single-player experience. Get Packed: Couch Chaos fares better if you can get some friends together so you can yell at each other in good spirits. That being said, in all honesty, by that point, you’re probably much better off playing Moving Out instead, as it’s a similar title that is superior in pretty much every way.
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