Too Long; Didn't Play: Clustertruck

Sponsored By: an honest-to-goodness review copy!

Time in transit: 45 minutes

Uhaul Review

The floor is lava, and the platforms are careening along at sixty miles per hour!

My inner eight-year-old can't get enough.

Convoy Review

“This one seems up your alley.”

Those are the words of our beloved co-founder, Shawn Andrich, as he emailed me a code for a pre-release review copy of Clustertruck. He may not be the Game King, but he's a prince in my book, because Clustertruck is not only up my alley, it's in my wheelhouse and my element as well.

Though how Certis got the keys to my Element, I'll never know.

Clustertruck is one of those things I like to call “pure games.” There's no story, no narrative at all. Just pure, adrenaline-infused, palm-soaked action.

Did you ever play “The Floor is Lava?” I did. Last week, in fact. One of the joys of fatherhood is that I have a socially acceptable excuse for doing things like skipping down a street, shooting at people with Nerf guns, and playing games like The Floor is Lava.

Clustertruck took the concept of The Floor is Lava and figured out how to make it more dangerous without adding lava. Instead of jumping from couch to chair in an effort to circumvent a room without touching the ground, you're jumping on the backs of semi-trucks piloted by terrible drivers at seventy miles per hour down rapidly crumbling highways during earthquakes. Or, for those of you on the West Coast of North America, it's like Wednesdays.

Hey-oh!

The conventional wisdom is that first-person platformers don't work. Like most conventional wisdom, it’s almost right and is subject to confirmation bias. If you look at a first person shooter like Half Life, you'd think that jumping puzzles don't belong in first person games. On the flip side, if you look at Mirror’s Edge you'd come away with the impression that first-person shooting works about as well as a chocolate camshaft.

Thankfully, Clustertruck doesn't try to make you shoot things, but it does feature some excellent platforming. The controls are not as tight nor as responsive as Mirror’s Edge, but that's not a knock against the game. You can have loose controls and still be a fun, so long as you're honest with the player about having loose controls and make up for it. For example, if you miss a truck but are near the edge, your invisible hands will grab the ledge so you can hit jump to climb up onto the roof. It’s like when they add auto-targeting to console shooters, except this is for jumping.

This is not to say the game is easy. The difficulty can be downright punishing at times, like when the trucks in front of you are piling up, and you have to make a jump to a truck on a different highway entirely while the truck beneath your feet begins to jackknife, throwing your momentum in the wrong direction to clear the gap and land on a truck going 70 miles per hour in a completely different direction.

You will touch the ground, in other words.

Fortunately, there are no load times between you and your next attempt. Before you even hit the ground you see a prompt to press any key to try again. More often than not, I'm still hammering the jump button when that prompt shows up, so I'm back in the action before I'm even ready to be there.

I'm sure there's some deliberate, well-thought-out strategy to getting the best score or completing the levels without failing. But that isn't the way to play this game, at least for me. No, my strategy is to charge in jumping with wild abandon as I try to move to the lead truck, which is the one least likely to crash before the finish line. If I fail, I try again, but I never stop moving to think about my next jump. Why would I do that when I can try again so easily?

Plus, my kids think the sorts of noises I make as I carom wildly off an exploding truck are absolutely hilarious, and you haven't heard laughter until you've heard it from a seven year old and a and nine year old.

Will I Keep Playing?

It's all well and good to build a simple, fun, arcade experience, but what keeps a person coming back? One way to do it is to add character progression. Wouldn't you know it? Clustertruck miraculously features just that. Earn enough points and you can add the ability to do things like double-jumps and air-dashes. Further up the skill tree I see abilities that let me slow down time or to spawn a new truck to land on. Working my way toward unlocking those abilities will keep me busy with this game for a while yet.

The nice thing is that even if I decide to never upgrade my character, the core game is still loads of fun. It didn't need the character progression to be a good game, but with it I might almost call it a great one.

Is it the Devil Daggers of naughty-sounding platformers?

There's a lot of challenge to live up to in Clustertruck. Even early on, a false step will send you back to the start of a stage. The frustration from failing is mostly ameliorated by the fact that there are no load times. You never have to stop moving. Even Devil Daggers makes you wait a second or two before the first wave of enemies spawns. Here, the trucks are exploding before your feet have even hit the first trailer.

Nine and three quarters out of ten daggers.

Comments

He may not be the Game King, but he's a prince in my book.

Oooh, I'll bet that one's gonna get you in trouble.
Love the review, the game seems like a lot of fun. How can "charging in jumping with wild abandon" not be fun?