This game is a lot to unpack. It took an incredible amount of time to understand the initial structure of it to the point where I could see the bright spots, as well as the ‘needs improvement’ places in the design. The game does a great job of juggling quite a few gameplay design details and requires a lot of thinking on the part of the gamer. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just means that you’re going to have to get your thinking cap on nice and snug for this one.
*snuggles it on*
Let’s get this started.
A deeper circus than most
The story of Circus Electrique is engaging and interesting. You play a reporter who is covering her uncle’s circus in London. There have been quite a few incidents within the London area, starting with the disappearance of the London Bridge, where common Londoners have become crazed, robotic killers. Your mission is to uncover the disturbance, find out who dunnit, and accompany your uncle’s slew of circus folks into battle to find some answers.
The story is quite good in Circus Electrique. The characters are defined, well-played, and don’t ask too much from you through a complicated three-act narrative. Instead, this is a grade A B-movie that hits all the right notes when it needs to and contains some fantastic surprises that keep you pressing forward. While there isn’t too much of a branching narrative attached to the overall gameplay, you do get some interactive moments in the story that at least allow you to make some dialogue choices that equal answers that add to the storytelling.
While the story is just plain fun, I’m particularly impressed with how the acting is pulled off. The director and screenwriter did an admirable job of putting the right people in the right place when they were looking for their players. From major to minor roles, the dialogue is delivered with fervor and well-placed sentiment. In short, I enjoyed the story and how it played out very much, as it was a bright, consistent spot for the overall gameplay.
So, bravo to the actors and the crew for delivering this part of the game without a hitch. Oh, and those writers as well. The story portion of Circus Electrique didn’t disappoint.
Before the hitch
Getting back to my original statement, this game is a lot to unpack. It’s a game that is a turn-based RPG, circus management simulator, and tactics game. Certainly, a lot of the latter genre. Essentially, the game works by you choosing circus performers with unique attributes (fighting, healing, snake charming, and more) and sending them on a trail of terror across London to find the hooligans responsible for death and destruction. The attributes are different depending on what type of circus performer you acquire for the task. You could get a clown, which is mainly someone who heals and does some damage with balls and hammers. You can get a magician that can cast dangerous illusions and screw with the minds of the enemies. You can even get a sword-swallowing performer that can shoot dangerous darts and heal people. There is also a strong man, some fire twirlers, snake charmers, and a set of talented chain-wielding wanders that can cause some real damage. Each type of circus performer comes equipped with specific attributes related to their trade, which means you have a lot to choose from when trying to strategize your approach in a fight. That’s not where all the complication lies, though.
You can upgrade these characters’ attributes, add some gadgets that act as additional buffs with said character, and you must select how they focus their performance during circus acts. That’s all before you send them into the three rings to perform for an audience. That is quite a bit to think about and that’s only the cusp of the battle procedure. It’s a complicated situation that is tough at the base level to understand. It’s not impossible, but it is a lot to juggle. Pun intended.
Once you choose your gaggle of characters, you can use four to go out and do battle. Then you take the rest of the 3-5 additional performers (you can have more than that number, but it’s tough to keep them fed if you don’t give good performances) and send them to the circus to perform and gather love/money/whatever from the crowd. They must wow the crowd for that to happen, though, and the only way to do that is to send in the right performers in the right combination. Each show and you get a variety to choose from (night, matinee, magic, whatever), must have specific performers match with each other to put on the best possible performance. Each character card you lay down for the circus equals out to a star if they connect well and correctly. The more stars you have, the more you can emphasize specific categories of entertainment for the crowd, which ultimately equals a successful show. Sometimes finding the right balance of performers with the right balance of fighters is a challenge. Scratch that, it can be maddening. In a good sort of way, though…most of the time. Sometimes both teams or just one team of performers simply don’t fit the bill when it comes to pulling off the perfect fight or show. It’s a balancing act. Pun intended.
Once you have your fighting team and your circus team set, then you must go fight. The fighting is set on a branching path, which allows you to choose the best route to the boss of each stage. Once you choose a path, the other paths are grayed out and, at least at the beginning of the game, inaccessible. That’s not a terrible way of doing things in the gameplay design, as eventually, you can make a return to fully completing the areas you travel through. It will certainly provide motivation to replay the game once you complete it.
Anyway, as you go from point to point on a path, you flip-flop most of the time between fighting and mini-game/choose-your-own-adventure. The fighting is labeled with a boxing glove, which sends you into a turn-based battle. Once you hit that point, you have a few things to think about. Firstly, the order of characters in the 2D layout is important when you want to keep certain people alive (healers are always and should always be in the back). You can shift players back and forth, while also finding enemies trying to pull your more important characters upfront. The more upfront characters are, the easier they are as targets for more damage. It’s a clever and typical tactics way of doing things in this type of gameplay, so it makes sense, and it works in this capacity.
The second issue players will be juggling is an attribute called devotion. This attribute will absolutely drive you insane during the fighting process. This is probably the most irritating part of the fighting design, as your characters can slowly lose devotion as you fight. Why this is irritating is that if you’re absolutely dominating a fight, they can still lose it. It would make sense for them to lose it if they’re struggling or the odds severely swing in the enemy’s favor, but to consistently lose it just to lose it simply doesn’t make any sense. The only way to get it back is to either drink a potion or have a healer bring up the meter, and both ways are slow. Devotion is important for a couple of reasons. It determines how well a player contacts an enemy, based on percentages. The more devotion, potentially the more damage you deal. If devotion gets too low, then a character will just give up and leave the fight. While that last part works for both sides, meaning that you can sap the devotion of an enemy to the point where they flee, there’s nothing quite disheartening than dedicating a healer to constantly reloading devotion points only to watch your best player depart because they’re too low on said points, regardless of their health. Again, it’s a bit maddening. I spent a good portion of my gameplay experience trying to watch the devotion meter, and it was challenging. It shouldn’t have been as draining on the gameplay experience as it was. There is nothing wrong with throwing a wrench at players, but this is a damning wrench. It just needed to be worked out a bit more.
Once those devotion-less players depart, they are thrown back into the character mix. To refill the devotion in a non-battle situation, you can send them to a resting structure near the circus tent. For every round of fighting, you pass a day, which refills a portion of that devotion meter on character sheets. It takes a long time to bring that devotion back up to a manageable level. If you give it too long of a time, you are more than likely going to lose fights, thus having to recover more devotion on my character sheets. If you bring the character back in too soon, then you’re more than likely going to lose them again and lose the fight. Devotion is important, but it shouldn’t be this important and this difficult to work with within the gameplay structure. This needs to be pulled back a bit on an update. It just is way too important in the game to the point where it is a distraction.
Getting back to battling, after you win a fight, you get the results of the fight and the results of the success/failure of the circus performance. Each brings rewards, and you can collect money, material, and food through these methods, and each pushes the player towards unlocking more of the game. It’s a dance with the gameplay and one that can go beautifully or one that can leave some sore feet depending on how the dance partners get along with each other. Don’t get me wrong, I love the concept of managing a circus, playing out a story, and sending circus folks out to kick some butt. I think that’s a brilliant design before smaller attributes come into play.
Returning to the path points, outside of fighting points on the map, you also have mini-games to take the edge off of battling. You have games like a cup/ball, where you follow a trio of cups with one ball hidden underneath one of the cups. If the arcade game Tapper prepared me for anything, it prepared me for this review. There is also a coin game that is just curling (from the Olympics) and a game of chance where you spin a wheel and can double down on prizes. There is also a small snippet of choose-your-own-adventure, where you are presented with a quick situation and can either help said situation out and be rewarded, or totally blow it. These little breaks help to give you a breather and expand the gameplay quite well. I enjoyed the heck out of the mini-games and wanted more of them. Anyway, they were great breaks.
After traversing through a map of points, you will eventually come across a boss. The first two bosses were a piece of cake. The difficulty ramped up a bit but didn’t go too far with its jump. The third boss? Oh, come prepared. While the journey to the third boss is riddled with more terrifyingly creative enemy characters to cross your path, their difficulty ramps up as much as their creativity does. By the time you get to the third boss, you’re in it. That boss is hard as hell, so take advantage of powering up your characters and making sure you have a good rhythm going with who is on your team and why. I absolutely loved this aspect of the game, where you prepare to a point and build a certain type of team to take on enemies. It falls back to that tactics-based fighting strategy, where you want to make sure you have the right people for the right job. While I can’t say I was immediately successful with the third boss, as it took more than a dozen tries, it had me laser-focused on the type of team I needed and why I needed that type. That is a great aspect of this game that plays hand-in-hand with what Zen Studios was trying to do with Circus Electrique’s gameplay, as you truly get to know how a certain team is put together for a certain situation. It’s just wonderful.
The other parts of the gameplay point back to the circus management. You will eventually and slowly build up your circus, attract new and specific people to come work for you, and open smaller pieces to your puzzle that enhance the gameplay experience. For example, there is a fortune teller that shows up in the gameplay that brings secrets for hidden paths and more intel when it comes to enemies. This person can also build up your character. There is a training tent that opens early in the game that allows you to train non-working circus performers (not fighting and not performing) which also helps in leveling them up. Each type of new avenue costs items or money, and each can be upgraded as you successfully go through the game. The game expands and feels big because of these new pieces in the circus. It also motivates you to keep going. Anytime you can be motivated to continue a game is a potentially good gaming experience.
For the most part, the gameplay is solid, but, again, I must say that there is a lot to unpack and learn to fully understand all the pieces and parts of Circus Electrique. It’s going to be challenging gameplay at times, but it will be a challenge to fully grasp what is expected of your attention while you journey through this game. It was worth the learning curve, so don’t give up on it. It is just a lot.
Presentation
One of the more fascinating parts of Circus Electrique is its style. It’s a gorgeous game with a Victorian atmosphere visually painted all over it. It made me want to go back and watch Moulin Rouge. Anyway, it’s a gorgeous game. From stylish and appropriately dressed characters for that time, to flickering and scratchy film foreground that reminds you of ye olden days. It is just an enthralling and beautiful game to behold when you load it up. Love everything about its style. It certainly had a lot of love and care from Zen Studios. They created a great atmosphere that fit the bill perfectly.
Okay, enough rambling. Let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Circus Electrique is a gorgeous game that juggles a lot of gameplay design ideas. It truly is a turn-based RPG with tactic-led elements, and circus management to boot. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, and sometimes it just doesn’t work because of the decisions that were made for it. Most of the time, it is a great game that takes a lot to get into and ultimately pays off with good gameplay.
