Backlog Beatdown: A Chicken with a Sword in Cluckles' Adventure

Cluckles’ Adventure came to my attention when I used to watch the Co-Optional Podcast with TotalBiscuit, Jesse Cox, Dodger and their guests. This game appeared in the releases section where they did a quick run-down of the games that were scheduled for launch; Cluckles came up in one of those and I found the premise fascinating.

Just to reiterate: A chicken with a sword.

Cluckles’ Adventure is a delightful little game about a chicken with a sword, who has to travel around 108 levels in three different environments saving the captured chicks and killing the minions. Cluckles can jump, double jump, slide down walls and do a kind of dash attack, and that’s basically it. You can only take one hit before you die and have to start the level again, although you can pick up armour and a shield later on to allow you to take more hits. These are the tools you have to complete your main objective, which is to get through the levels. This allows you to proceed, but to truly beat a level you have to collect all the chicks as well.

As a game, Cluckles is pretty basic – but therein lies its charm. The level design is for the most part on point – entertaining enough paths to the level exit, often full of secret areas that reward exploration, and rarely more than a minute or two long so having to return to the start of the level when you die is not a major issue. Your move set might seem rather limited for a game released in 2017, but “how do I get past this bit?” becomes a very different question when the answer lies in one of the few options available to you right from the start. I’ve found that most games that don’t aim for realism in their art style age pretty well, and the graphics in Cluckles are pixel art, designed to resemble an old 8-bit game. This is deliberately designed to replicate an art style that didn’t age well, but Cluckles is a fine example of it’s use, and will certainly look no worse in five years! The sound has the old-style chip-tune bloops and whistles as well, and while the sound track isn’t particularly memorable, it does the job.

Presumably this screenshot is from the mobile port...

The game is a joy to play. The controls are tight and responsive, (I used the Steam controller for my play through because I didn’t want to brutalise my laptop keys with a platform game!) it’s genuinely challenging in places, and the levels are a lot of fun to beat. It’s simple enough that almost anybody can pick it up and have a go, and there are no adult-level themes that would restrict its audience. It’s probably the best game I own for being able to pick it up and have a bit of a play: There’s no contrived game system to learn, no levelling up or extra abilities, no incompetently-coded difficulty spikes, no overly elaborate plot, no belligerent multiplayer communities. It’s just you, a chicken and a sword, for however long you want to play it – and you’ll have a great time doing it.

Cluckles falters only slightly in the somewhat anticlimactic end game. Apart from the fact that the last few levels are slightly longer, there isn’t much differentiation between what you’re doing at the start of the game and what you’re doing at the end. This isn’t much of an issue; if anything it adds to the game’s pick-up-and-play mentality as you can easily come back to it after months and be none the worse for it. But there are no boss battles to speak of, no extra challenge apart from what the level presents, and there’s very little in-game reward for beating the game. None of this detracts from what is overall a very well-designed game – but people who are fans of the old-school platformers that it’s clearly trying to replicate may be expecting a little bit more.

Cluckles’ Adventure manages to present the core experience of video games without augmenting it. It throws out the bathwater, keeps the baby, and while not everybody will see it through to the end, it’s worth a look – you’ll enjoy whatever time you put in to it.

Final Score: 4/5. Great game.

Last Week's Games: FTL

Well that week didn’t go quite as planned! The Pathfinder game I said I was going to run at the end of last week was cancelled, since one of the players – sadly the one who hosts the game – was taken ill and couldn’t host it. I wish him a speedy recovery and hopefully we’ll get back on it at some point next month, but it looks like I won’t be playing any more roleplaying games until then.

I didn’t have a huge amount of time for playing games either. I progressed a little further into the campaign in Spider Man, beating a double-pronged boss battle (I won’t spoil it if you haven’t played the game; if you have, you’ll know who I mean!) and as I mentioned last week, getting ever closer to the endgame.

Your starting ship...

No, the game I spent the largest amount of time playing this week was FTL: Faster Than Light on my laptop. This is among the first games I bought for the PC, way back in 2012 when I was using a Windows 7 laptop. I saw a review for it by Angry Joe and decided to check it out! The hardware on my laptop was by no means designed for playing games so my games were somewhat limited, but FTL will run on just about anything so for once it was an option for me.

And what a delight it was! If you don’t know, it’s a space game in which you have to transport vital information about the Rebel Fleet to The Federation. It’s interesting to see the Rebels being the enemy for a change, though the line between good and bad is somewhat blurred – the Federation purports to be a coalition of effort to colonize space between the various races of the galaxy, and the Rebels are made up almost entirely of humans trying to wipe out Federation control. Xenophobic and oppressive, one would think, but since the alien races that are meant to be a part of the Federation are every bit as likely to attack you, one might reasonably wonder if the Rebels have a point. It’s Firefly meets Star Trek in theme, and a joy to play.

You control the power allocation, action and various crew of a star ship, and have to play through several short tasks in order to traverse the galaxy and deliver your info. The layout and interface suggests a strategy game, but I have found it works as a Roleplaying game as well. Here’s your ship, here’s your crew, here’s what it can do, here’s the situation the game has put in front of you; what are you going to do about it?

Well that could have gone better!

But as I was playing through the game, I found myself wondering who it is for. I enjoy the game enough to recommend it to anybody with a pulse, but it’s not new; it was released in 2012 and games have, by their very nature, evolved since then. But seven years later, I’m still playing it, still discovering new things, still enjoying it. It was acclaimed at the time for it’s excellence in design, and it still holds up today. The graphics were nowhere near on par with what was available even at release, but the almost minimalist art style looks as good now as it did back then. The soundtrack is gorgeous, and the effects are lovely as well. The Rogue-like gameplay is designed for many runs, and while it takes a little too long to get to the endgame (I only ever managed it a couple of times before the major content update in 2014, and never since,) the sheer scale of things to do in between is staggering. No two runs are ever the same; there’s a lot of value in it.

So I would suggest that, if your principle experience of playing games is on console and mobile devices, and you’re wondering what PC games do so differently to make it a worthwhile investment, you could do a lot worse than try this game out. It will challenge you on the right level, and will keep on giving long after you’ve replaced the machine you play it on!

 

Last Week's Games: Spiderman, Reigns, Bubble Bath Bunny and Roleplaying Speculation

Spins a web, any size...

I find myself at a point I knew I was going to run into when I started the blog again – not picking up a new game every week means that sometimes I have to search to find something interesting to say! I’ve been playing Spiderman a lot, of course, but that’s been the case for weeks now. I’m getting quite close to the end-game, and I want to make sure I’ve at least done everything else I need to do before I get there. I also researched the trophies available for the game to find out what the hidden ones were, as I don’t want to get bogged down by having to look for them. One of them requires you to visit Uncle Ben’s grave, I’d never have thought of that! It’s looking like I’m going to need at least one more play-through to 100% clear the game, because I need to beat it on New Game + mode at maximum difficulty, but it appears as though all your unlocks, suits etc. are carried over into the new game so I only need to focus on the story elements; less of the faff that comes with open world games!

Looks basic, but surprisingly addictive...

I also had a go with Reigns, a whimsical game which I must have talked about in the past at some point but I don’t know when. (I usually name the text documents I write these blogs on after the games I’ve been playing in the week; that combined with the date stamp on the file usually gives me a useful clue but I don’t always write all the games down!) It’s a game where you are the king, and every year you have to make a decision based on what an advisor or character has told you. Each decision affects your kingdom in four different ways: Religion, People, Military and Money, and if one of those indicators reaches the bottom, you die. You are then replaced by a different king and you start all over again. I usually play this when I’ve got half an hour or so to spare at work; it appears to be an unlock-fest rather than any particularly-driven plot, but it’s fun for a while, even if the interface and control method lends itself better to a mobile game (which it is.)

During her first game...

When my daughter stayed with me over the weekend we played Bubble Bath Bunny, a board game I bought at the UK Games Expo. I won’t say too much about it as I want to do a full review of it at some point, but it’s a memory game aimed at very young children; ages 2 and up. You roll a lovely big dice and try to pick up a face-down token that matches colour or symbol. We have a lot of fun playing it, and even though Jessie can only really manage one round before she starts to lose concentration, she is equally happy playing, winning or losing. That’s the mark of a good game, I think!

Mad as a fish. And so is Xanathar,

I’ve been reading a lot of the Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, and watching a lot of Taking20 videos about Dungeons and Dragons while wishing I had time to play it. While I still run Pathfinder for some friends from time to time (and indeed will be doing so next week so I might actually have something interesting to say about it,) I do miss playing on a weekly basis; work and family commitments got in the way of my regular group so I don’t go anymore. I’m particularly enjoying Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, mainly for the little remarks Xanathar makes throughout the book which are amusing but also a salient representation of how a monster might react to human-level conventions! I also discovered through the videos the potential for Multi-classing, which is something I’ve been against up until now but I’m starting to recognise some of it’s potential for combining effects! It will be a long time, if ever, before I return to playing role-playing games on a regular basis but I hope that when I do, I can bring some of those mechanical concepts to life while my character remains a convincing-enough entity to role-play.

 

Last Week's Games: Warcraft and Spider Man

I haven’t had time to play a huge number of games this week, but it will make writing about the ones I have played a little more straightforward:

I bought, downloaded and played the original Warcraft on my laptop. This was a game I’d owned in my youth; I’m old enough to remember a time before the massive entity World of Warcraft eventually became, and the first three Warcraft games were real-time strategy titles. This particular genre of games had something of a “Golden Age” in the mid-late 90s, and along with Dune 2, Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was one of the first games to really make the genre popular.

Neither game aged particularly well, though. The graphics were OK for the time but look hideous now, and the interface, while functional, was handled much better in later strategy titles. The main aspect that later games developed out of was group-selecting. In Dune 2, you couldn’t do it at all, and in Warcraft, you can only do it by holding the shift key as you select up to four of your units – and as there is no way to keep them in the group you have to do this every time you want to select them. As you can imagine, this is a massive faff!

Not quite sure how those numbers at the top work,
but whatever, we'll run with it.

With that being said, I’ve really enjoyed the game so far. I’ve been playing as the Orcs for my play through, and once the first two levels have taught you the principle game mechanics, it lets you on your own to tackle the missions as you see fit. As resources are finite, a war of attrition is a very dangerous game indeed, and it is up to you to find different strategies to beat the level, often employing advantages in the map. On the third mission, for example, the key points of the map are the two bridges – if you can put a strong enough force on both bridges, you’ll buy yourself enough time to build up a big enough army to attack the Humans. On the fifth mission, the Humans have access to more powerful units, and once I’d secured the bridge on to the Human side of the island, I found it most effective to attack their peasants to stop them getting any money – therefore removing their option to build their heavier units.

I also really enjoyed the fourth mission where you have to take a small force through a dungeon full of Ogres and Slime to assassinate the Orc Commander’s daughter. I used to hate missions like these because I didn’t like not having the option to build more units. Now that I’m a bit older and I’ve played more games, ‘how do I win this’ becomes a very different question when you’ve got more limited options, and I had a lot more fun utilising the options available to me. Once I’d dealt with the horde of slime monsters, I had a good time drawing the ogres out with my Raiders into a wall of spears thrown by my Spearmen, with a couple of Grunts to finish them of if I needed to. I guess I like going back to the core experience of video games, to see what they had to offer!

Does whatever a Spider can, I've heard...

I’ve been playing Marvel’s Spiderman on the PS4 when I’ve found the time; I’m doing quite well now. However, I hope it isn’t necessary to earn gold on all of the Taskmaster’s challenges in order to 100% the game! The bomb and drone missions in particular are very challenging indeed, although I managed the stealth missions easily enough.

I’m about 80% of the way through the game now, and while the principle villains of the game are pretty obvious from the start, the story aspects are handled very well. There have been many interpretations of how Spiderman’s rogue’s gallery got to be the way they are, and without wishing to spoil, it was a refreshing change to see some of them become the super-villains as a slow descent into madness rather than one specific incident that happens at the start of most of the films. It is a far richer story as a result!

See you all next week!

Last Week's Games: Kingdoms of Amalur, Spiderman, UK Games Expo

I’ve been surprisingly busy over the last few weeks, and for this reason I haven’t managed to get a blog out in a while. Today’s post covers roughly three weeks.

Feyblades. That Ettin had better watch out!

I had a go on the Xbox 360 with a game I hadn’t played for a long time: Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning. This is a Role Playing Game set in a somewhat typical fantasy setting, where your player character has died. They are brought back to life, and they now have to discover the mystery of how that happened and the extent of their power – to interfere with people’s fates. It is a good game with a strong combat system, with some bugs and uninspired enemy design, and I enjoy coming back to it every now and then. There’s a lot to do, though, and like many RPGs I wonder if I will ever see it through to the end!

This is a fun costume to unlock!

I’ve also played Spiderman on the PlayStation 4. This was a fairly recent purchase for me, bought with some saved-up Nectar Points from Sainsburys, and will probably be the most up-to-date game I buy for a long while! Now, I have fond memories of Spiderman 2 on the PS2, and from what I understand, no Spiderman game has surpassed it yet. However, this iteration of the game has done a pretty good job so far, with an improved combat system and voice acting. It includes a lot of features included in modern open world games, such as skill progression trees and side activities to do alongside the main campaign. Where Spiderman trumps almost all other open world games is that getting around is an absolute joy. Swinging through New York is a crucial element to any Spiderman game, and once you get used to how it is implemented in this version, you can cover vast distances and pull all sorts of tricks and stunts to keep the movement flowing and rapid. Almost all of the missions involve doing this to a certain extent, but because it is so much fun to swing around New York, it rarely feels like pointless busy work. I’m a little over 60% of the way through it so far, and this is one of the very few games I feel I have a hope of 100% completing, so I’m going for that.

You’ll remember last month I made some remarks about doing some videos for Youtube. I’m now putting those plans into fruition, since XSplit Gamecaster seems to be a lot friendlier on the file size when recording these videos! At the moment I’m capable of recording some raw footage with microphone commentary. Due to work and family commitments and lack of video editing software I wouldn’t suggest expecting anything substantial yet, but I’m working on a few scripts and concepts that I’m hoping to bring to life in the short-term future.

Also last weekend I went to the UK Games Expo. Some of you may remember from last year that this is very much a highlight of my year, and this year was the best one yet. I played loads of games, made some new friends and generally had a great time. It is my intention to write about what I got up to there but I’m going to divide my coverage of it into three categories:

Tournaments and Tribulations: A brief return for the series I intended to start last year, where I talk about the games I played as part of tournaments and how I got on.

First Impressions: My friend Tom and I participated in several demo games across the Expo, so I’ll write about what we thought of each one. Some of these are still in the final stages of development and have not been released yet.

Games We Played: On the Saturday Night we met up with some folks I’d never met before and played a whole load of games I’d not had the chance to play for a long time, if ever. This will be similar in format to the first impressions with the added fact that these games have already been published and released.

That’s a lot of writing to do, I hope I have time!