Garage is a top-down action game. You dropped into a dimly lit area and you need to find weapons to survive against the mutants within that area. The first half of the game is very enjoyable you won’t have an experienced point type progression system here, but rather you really rely on progressing through earning weapons.
You first have access to an axe and then a pistol, a shotgun, a submachine gun, and then another machine gun. The combat is very satisfying, especially because when you shoot the mutants, arms and limbs are flying off along with their heads with the real body mass and very satisfying. The axe is great using at the beginning, especially to use its charge attack because that’ll make quick work on many of the mutants. While also helps you conserve on ammo right in the beginning of the game. Enemies can hide in the shadows on the map. So when you open up a door you really need to be on your toes or you’re going to quickly be overrun. It’s also really encouraged to just blow any of the walls within the game because you never know when you’re going to stumble across a hidden area which has a couple med kids or maybe a new weapon for you to use.
There are three bosses within the game and we rather enjoyed fighting that they range from large enemies to defeat to creepy ones. The shooting feels good and we enjoyed fighting the mutants. You do encounter human enemies later that use guns that totally changes the tactics that you are going to need to do with the combat. Fighting against mutants, you really just need to worry about a bunch of melee type attackers that’ll just start rushing you. Humans, on the other hand, will have a wide variety of guns and sometimes grenades that can really make combat a lot more challenging.
Visually we like how this thing goes for a very 80s feel and what we mean by that is, it just reminds us of a John Carpenter flick. The game keeps up upon fun and intense pace for about three hours and then sadly about halfway through the game, the second half the game is just weaker compared to the first half, you’ll have this stealth sequence, where all your weapons that you just obtained for the last few hours are all taken away from you. It becomes a lot more of a trial and error throughout this sequence and not in a good way. The game is at its best when you’re fighting mutants. It doesn’t really seem built to be able to tackle the stealth type missions. Though the self-sequence isn’t too bad in hindsight within the moment while you’re actually in that part of the game. It’s extremely frustrating you start wondering why this was put into the game.
After this point, the game continues to descend and the frustration is out of these new tower like enemies that you have to fight with the robot facility. They aren’t as interesting or as fun as the mutant-like enemies that you had to fight for the beginning half of the game. We do appreciate that they tried, and some enemy varieties about the experience, but it just didn’t work here. As when you’re fighting the mutants that’s when the combat is at its best. You need to watch out make sure that they don’t surround you. You need to make sure that you’re switching to your weapons and not reloading them to be able to take out every mutant you come across and it has a really good intensity to it.
The stealth sequence and the towers really take away from what this game does very well. We did have the game crash on us once and we respawned at the checkpoint surrounded by enemies behind us so that when we died and had to go back to that checkpoint. The enemies were still there and they got a beat on us really quickly, so they were able to take us out. It was really frustrating because the only way to really get through this is the kind of trial our way through it or restart the level, but we didn’t want to lose our progress. Eventually, we did find a way to proceed but the whole checkpoint system for this part was just a little odd, but it was just one point during the whole game.
Garage is the definition of a mixed bag. The first half is very enjoyable, while the second half is just very inconsistent. I would recommend getting this game on a sale and then play the game until you get annoyed with it. Because after the pace starts to change it doesn’t get any better for the second half. We do wish that the game had some type of survival mode or challenge mode, just to add some post-game content to the game, because of right now there’s just the main campaign. Overall check this one out on the sale.
We were given a digital review code by tinyBuild and reviewed the game on Nintendo Switch.
