izigame.me

Clive and Wrench is what seems to be a passion project trying to sell itself past it's competitors but failing to give a justifiable reason for its increased pricing point. This game I got on sale for 15 dollars, and that seems like it should have been it's base price. At least. I say "at least" because it might sell even better under 10 dollars. But 30 dollars will turn off a lot of the market, which I think has reflected in the reception as well.
I enjoyed playing through this overall, but there is a lot of weird bugs ranging from annoying to almost game breaking. This is coming from someone who considers himself to be very/abnormally good at 3D platformers, and is actually working on one right now. (Not relevant i know lol, but I can see and understand the development process. This is also my personal account, not my dev account)
The game is functional so that isn't a problem for me.
The opening cutscenes when you start the game are way too long and immediately disengage the player from any immersion. Even if you skip all the cutscenes there is a considerable amount of wait-time between you starting the game, and actually being able to move your character. I would have made it play once, and optionally added it in some "archive" where you can revisit cutscenes (unless that's already done)
The character models have some weird design choices, specifically referring to the weird way the low-res-fur is applied to the models, making it look unpolished. I'd much rather have that toon-ish cleaner look that's shown in the cover art.
Also I don't like the character design of Dr Daucus. He looks really weird and his head is very deformed especially compared to Clive who is presumably the same species. (I know 3D platformers exaggerate the characters, but I still don't like his design nonetheless) I don't want to hate Dr Daucus solely because the design is bad/weird/ugly, I want to see more of his motivations that turned him into the "power seeking control freak" he is now. Maybe how he was treated contributed to his motivations? Not just "stop/kill the weird-looking person who wants to take over the world for no apparent reason", because there is quite literally 0 backstory behind why this is even happening.
The weird imps also look really... weird, and is quite similar to yooka laylees interpretation and integration which is a one hit kill (glad its not more). Still I don't find that very engaging and i'm incentivized to ignore or avoid it because i don't get anything most of the time. In contrast I really like the character design of Vlad The Impala, Arnis Mantis, Cerratopple, and Cybro the Dragon. Everything else I cant find really recognizable (even Clive to some extent feels not too recognizable), and this might have to also be because there's so many worlds and characters that the player breezes through only to fight a boss one time and move on.
Talking about Clive specifically. He isn't really recognizable because I don't really understand what he is supposed to be. Even classic Mario ("Jump-Man"), who was meant to be indistinguishable was a plumber and the game features a lot of pipes that he traverses through.
Is clive supposed to be a hero, or a "1950 refrigerator time traveler"? or both? I really don't understand any of his motivations, and while I know the games story and clive doesen't exactly take itself seriously, it makes me unable to take it seriously as well, which makes the characters not memorable in my opinion. While Yooka Laylee also suffers a similar problem, at least Yooka and Laylee express their lack of seriousness through dialogue when they interact with the various NPC's around.
Also there isn't a lot of cutscenes that develop the story past the beginning and the end, besides "fight boss and save purple goo from destroying world", so I dont know what the games story is trying to tell me. It might have been better off to just prioritize pure platforming gameplay at that point, but it seems to be more about exploration, which involves a lot of exploring the maps, doing the same fetch quests, and moving on. Theres nothing wrong with the first time its being introduced, but when the same characters are present giving the same tasks, it starts to hinder the experience.
In terms of animation, the opening cutscene with the girl rabbit, and Clive and Wrench is way too long and not engaging at all. Its a lot of weird panning with the camera that lasts too long before cutting to the next angle. The ingame dialogue is really annoying, specifically because of the vocals that repeat more than three times and it's not amusing either. It's just annoying, and I would recommend to either have a typewriter effect ambiance (like in Undertale), or full voice lines, or at least don't make that random gibberish repeat more than once. It makes my head want to explode, truthfully.
I was almost about to quit the game because of how the mouse and camera force you to look in a certain direction (probably for controllers) I have no idea why this functionality cant be disabled and it hindered my experience greatly in the beginning and I would have left a negative review if I ended there, which sucks because I love 3D platformers.
The keybinds were also really weird, and I don't think the game tells me what to do with my keyboard, and only tells game controller users what to press for specific move abilities. Which is very weird to be because i know Unity is meant to be developed on a computer, so computer support would be the most easiest to implement....
The graphics are good enough for me but i'd appreciate it if the characters were textured better at least. Also theres some weird culling of objects right in front of you, and tons of Unity warnings talking about some physics not being optimized. The character gameplay animation is also pretty good as well. I'm worried about the cutscene animations a lot more, and THAT needs to be worked on.
Overall it feels and looks like something one person would have made in unity in a 10 year development cycle started in 2011. (which is what happened lol) I also started making a game around two years ago, and decided to pause that, and work on another project and I was able to do a lot more more efficiently with all the previous skills/knowledge once I was familiar with the game making process. So I'm sure the developer would have learnt a lot from this to take into account on their next project. Also lower your scope please. A big reason why my newer games are turning out a lot better is because I significantly lowered the amount of content i'm making for it rather than some "grand idea" or "dream game".
Looking at how much this game has gone through from its original kickstarter to this final release though is a true testament to how determined the developer is to make this game, and I very much support the developer behind this and wish him good luck with his next projects. The fact that this game has both released under a publisher with console support, and improved to the point where I can forgive the jankiness is more than enough for me, though of course there's always room for improvement. There is also a lot of cool content you can experience if again, you let all the jankiness aside. I'm sure the developer has also had to read a lot of hard reviews, so I wish that he takes it all as a great learning experience, and he should be proud of this for persevering so much. Because I very much care about people who put in effort to make games to make people happy, especially since game development is brutal and not financially viable most of the time. A fresh clean project would be the ideal direction truthfully, which I can currently see a new one is being developed which I am very interested in seeing.