Deputy Dangle accompanies a niche genre that’s wearing out its welcome. Playing a character that’s boneless and hard to control was cute with Octodad and it made sense. Controlling a slice of bread in I Am Bread was silly. Ubisoft’s Grow Home was a charming experiment though the necessity of sloppy movement seemed contrived for the sake of making the premise more interesting. And Deputy Dangle just feels like it was an experiment with odd movement that should have stayed in the lab. It adds nothing to the genre and the previous games are better.

Dangle, the star of the self-titled game, has been promoted to Deputy. He’s a human with no bones, so he throws his limbs around to get where he needs to go. Shortly after promotion, an elderly lady named GMA robs a bank. It’s up to Deputy Dangle and his partner Chongo, a giant knuckle-dragging cop, to spoil her plans of destroying the town of Dangleton. The deputy has to talk to citizens, confront a CEO, rescue citizens from fires and sharks, among other things; all while throwing himself around like a puppet on strings to reach his destinations.

Clearly it’s meant to be a silly game but silly is something more overt like personifying bread. This feels like amateur humor wrapped in a silly idea. Chongo is your typical all brawn and no brains character and the other NPC’s humor borderlines on 4th grade punchlines. And I don’t get the impression this game is made for fourth graders.

Some mission have genuinely creative ideas that made me chuckle and were enjoyable to play. One mission was to play a game of Pong with a dresser and a cat strapped with dynamite. Another was taking a plunger gun and shooting it at other cars on the freeway to reach GMA. The problem was they lasted too long. They felt like minigames that should’ve been two minutes but they lasted for 10 minutes or more. And that’s the general feeling of the whole game. Controlling Dangle is amusing for a little while. It’s funny watching him roll or spin across the ground but after a few missions, the novelty wears off and controlling Dangle veers into irritating territory. Including the campaign, Deputy Dangle comes with four minigame challenges that manage to extend the life a few more minutes. I enjoyed two of them and kept challenging myself to get a better spot on the online leaderboards but there’s not enough depth to continue playing for an extended period.

Music works the same way. A few songs catch your interest. They’re jazzy tunes mixed with pop-techno blends that fill your ears with thumping kick drums and sultry saxophones. But you hear the same three of four songs throughout the game. It’s not until one of the later levels you hear a brand new (and the best) song.

Ultimately, when Deputy Dangle shines, it shines for a brief moment as the rest of the game is full of completely unnecessary design problems. Chashu Entertainment highly encourages you to use a gamepad and it’s obvious why. Mouse and keyboard controls are atrocious. With a gamepad, you control the direction Dangle moves with the left thumbstick and you use ABXY to throw individual limbs around. With PC controls, you use WASD to throw his limbs and when you use the PC controls, the mapping shown on Dangle shows gamepad controls. Leftstick movement is done by sliding the mouse in a direction and visualized by a donut with a thumbstick in the middle. It’s so bad, I don’t know why they included PC controls. I’m a gamepad user through and through but it’s disrespectful to PC gamers who enjoy using mouse and keyboard and the controls included aren’t worth using, and you can’t change them.

Deputy Dangle is also littered with bugs. I found two game-breaking bugs that forced me to restart from my previous checkpoint (and I could replicate it), which you can see in the video review. A few others confirmed Dangle wasn’t ready to come out the oven. The most curious bug came after I updated my computer to the Windows 10 Anniversary OS. I could scroll through menu options and use the Find-O-Meter (a tool that helps you navigate the small city) by pressing down on the D-pad. After the update, the D-pad never worked again. But it wasn’t a problem with the Windows 10 update because I tested several Steam games and the D-pad worked perfectly with them. Also, at no point did the game ever save my inversion options. Sometimes after I paused the game, it would uncheck my choice.

Performance and Graphics

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Minimum Requirements:
OS: Windows 7 or Higher
Processor: Core i3 3.0Ghz or equivalent
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: GeForce GTS 450 or Radeon HD 4890 or equivalent
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 5 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9 compatible sound device
Additional Notes: Best played with gamepad. Steam controller or Xbox 360, Xbox One, Logitech F310, or Logitech F710 controller

Performance strangely got better after the update though it wasn’t consistent. Before the update, the game did not maintain 30 FPS and it couldn’t even reach 40. After the update, it could reach 60 FPS but mostly stayed around 40–45. So I’m thinking there was an update that wasn’t shown on the developer’s IndieDB, Steam, or Facebook page and it caused some “improvements” and broke other mechanics.

Additional Thoughts

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Chashu Entertainment couldn’t find a way to take Deputy Dangle’s best elements and fuse them in ways that punctuated their fun. Instead, all we get is a game that’s longer than it should be, buggy, ignores basic PC player needs, simpleminded humor, and it performs poorly. If you get to play this game for free, go ahead and check it out. I don’t think you should avoid it at all no matter what but I certainly wouldn’t spend money to play this.