Trouble in Cookie Town Review (PC)

I’ve a sweet tooth for clotted creams and grappling hooks, raspberry jams and kicking the living daylights out of jello-like clay monsters from atop a tower of gingerbread and asphalt. An unusual combination of tastes, but one that just so happens to exist within the candy-coated corridors of Trouble in Cookie Town, of all things. That’s right, Cookie Town is fresh out of the oven, and it just so happens to be teeming with all of the guilty afternoon delights and shoddy appetizers that one might expect from an independent parkour-based bakehouse first-person shooter. Hallelujah, I think.

There’s a great deal to digest here, so let’s start with the outer crust—the grease-proof foundation from which Trouble in Cookie Town builds its candy-centric world. Story-wise, the game casts its focus on the titular metropolis of Cookie Town, a once-idyllic city that has, in the aftermath of an outbreak of ravenous monsters, transformed into a ruthless place where each and every crumb and chocolate chip is no longer safe. And the one saving grace that holds these carnivorous creatures back—a “Legendary Broccoli”—is in fragments across the length of the world. Simply put, Cookie Town is being devoured from the inside out, and it’s up to you, a grappling hook-wielding hero, to rebuild the Broccoli and drive the enemies back before the city is reverted back to breadcrumbs. A classic good-versus-evil tale, then.

That’s Just How the Cookie Crumbles

Trouble in Cookie Town is, first and foremost, a first-person parkour-centric game. As such, the goals that you’re aiming to accomplish here, in short, are either platforming related or to do with bolting around the skylines via a trusty grappling hook. Aside from that, there’s also a generous amount of traditional combat—a segment that consists of multiple horde units jumping, sprinting, and attacking, and the player, armed with dual-wield weapons, repelling shots and thwarting enemies. And I’ll admit, while the initial portion of this experience—the parkour, that is—is a lot of fun, the combat is a little hectic. Maybe not in a bad way, but in a way that makes you question the AI and patterns of behavior. The gunplay, too, is a little floaty and ragdoll-like. Again, not a bad thing, but something that requires a bit of extra effort to learn.

Going back to the parkour aspect of the game — it isn’t a picture-perfect emulation of a Mirror’s Edge clone, or anything that comes near to being an award-winning free running experience, for that matter. That said, the grappling hook that it provides is strangely fun to experiment with, more so given the fact that the world itself contains several skyscrapers and launch pads to help you chain effective combos and lines together. Sure, it isn’t perfect, and certain landings can be awfully tricky to stick, but I personally found that aimlessly zipping through the streets brought a lot of adolescent joy to the experience. A simple thing, but one that made the overall journey all the more fruitful and comical.

Breadcrumbs & Broccoli

If you’re a fan of Just Cause or, for the sake of argument, any other destructible sandbox game that sideline pulpy plot points to prioritize entry-level carnage and mindless gameplay, then you shouldn’t find it to be too much of an issue to sink your teeth into Trouble in Cookie Town. Again, the story isn’t as worthy of sharing the same platter as a lot of its meatier kin, and the collect-a-thon nature of the experience isn’t as incentive-focused as a significant portion of its adversaries’ worlds. And yet, there’s a great deal of fun to be had here, more so if you’re willing to substitute a structurally sound RPG with all of the award-winning flair and characteristics for a slightly less extravagant indie platforming-shooter.

I’ll admit, I did think that the so-called Cookie Town would feature a few more candy-coated set pieces. Yet, what I found in the nooks and crannies was the usual peppering of generic cityscape assets—dull towers, highways, and copy-and-pasted shrubbery, for example. Perhaps that’s a minor issue, and one that doesn’t necessarily warrant a complaint. Even still, it feels worth mentioning that, in spite of its attempt to capture a cookie-addled composition, it doesn’t quite deliver the essence of a digital bakehouse with all of the crusts and chocolate chips that you would expect to find from such a world.

Verdict

Trouble in Cookie Town is bursting at the seams with harmless brawling shenanigans and surprisingly edible parkour mechanics that, while not as intuitive and as enjoyable as a lot of A-league FPS titles, will likely keep fans of the genre dipping their fingers into the cookie jar for an extra handful of crumbs. Again, while there isn’t enough here to invoke a food coma, I have to give credit where it’s due and say that the devs have managed to build a pleasantly sized sandbox and fill it with all of the sweet treats and toasted trappings of a good old-fashioned palate-cleansing appetizer.

The world itself might not be flush with the most visually intoxicating elements in the world, much less the foodie hallmarks of a candy-coated kitchen, for that matter. But where it lacks in caloric value and thematic substance, it most certainly makes up for in other areas—its mindlessly entertaining grappling hook mechanics and open-ended freedom, being two of its finest features. And as for the story, eh — it’s not exactly memorable, much less an original idea that hasn’t been told before. That said, it plays it safe with a universally accepted good-versus-bad formula—a premise that, despite its obvious flaws and predictable consequences, is still a barrel of fun to watch unfold.

If you have a thirty-minute window to spare, and just so happen to have an inner craving for some good old-fashioned entry-level sandbox parkour, then you’ll probably enjoy swinging around and chasing the cookie crumbs in this short but oddly sweet adventure. It won’t line your stomach, but it ought to give you enough of a caloric boost whilst you wait for that next multi-tier banquet.