“Octodad: Dadliest Catch” Review

Octodad: Dadliest Catch makes its debut on the PS4 in all of its ridiculous glory. What Is It? Octodad: Dadliest Catch is the story of an octopus that has managed to manipulate his tentacles to give himself a human-like form and successfully live…

Octodad: Dadliest Catch makes its debut on the PS4 in all of its ridiculous glory.

What Is It?

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is the story of an octopus that has managed to manipulate his tentacles to give himself a human-like form and successfully live amongst humans. Since taking on this new life, he has gotten married, had two kids, and managed to live happily with nobody being the wiser. Well, not everybody. There is a pesky sushi chef that has discovered Octodad’s secret, and has vowed to spend every second catching the Octodad and revealing his secret to his family. Of course, Octodad manages to slip away at the last moment, making the chef crazier and more determined to outsmart our lovable cephalopod.

Why Should I Care?

Octodad’s delightfully ridiculous premise gets even better once you start playing the game, as the controls are complex in an equally ridiculous way. Using the analog sticks in conjunction with the triggers flails your legs around while just moving the analog sticks alone lets you control your arms. The X button grabs onto things to finish up the controls. It might sound simple, but the Octodad’s arms and legs all control with a freeform sense of gravity and physics that makes even the most simple things more difficult and confusing to accomplish. Simple things like making coffee, mowing the lawn, and cooking burgers becomes more of an exercise in physical comedy boring chores. You can pick up and throw almost everything that isn’t stuck to the ground, which can make precise grabbing another difficult action.

While the game is at first built around comedic moments where you’re doing simple things with a character that cannot accomplish them in a simple way, Octodad definitely falls into a trap of trying to inject more of a typical difficulty progression by asking you to be more precise and imposing harsher punishments for being as sloppy as it lets you be. Things like stealth sections, areas where you have to walk over narrow beams, platforming sequences, one particular chase sequence, and just an overall tougher selection of objectives in the second half of the game makes for a more frustrating experience than the game should offer for what it’s best at. The other major issue I had was with the Move controls that worked okay at best as the calibration never seemed to offer controls that were on par with the precision that the controller offers, so I ended up switching to the controller for the last half of the game.

What Makes It Worth My Time And Money?

Octodad: Dadliest Catch is easily one of the most ridiculous games out there today and it’s great that it’s now available on the PS4 and PC for $14.99. Besides the frustrating moments, the other knock on the game to hinder it’s recommendability is that it takes about two hours to finish. The only reasons it offers to replay are the collectible ties hidden in each level and a silly co-op mode that divvies up the controls between two players, which aren’t really going to add much enjoyment to what you get the first time around. Despite the flaws, Octodad offers a good, ludicrous journey that at least pays off in its key moments to make enduring the frustration worth it in the end.