Clive 'N' Wrench Review (Pearbasket)
I wish there was a neutral option for reviews, because then I'd use it here. I don't want this passion project to get shafted so I'm leaving it as Positive. For context, I got all achievements.
I enjoyed quite a bit of my time in the game:
For starters, it shows that the sole developer put their whole being into this game, and how passionate they are about 3D Platformers of the N64 and PS1 era.
There's quite a few levels in this game, and they're all varied in theming and environmental design, and they're fun to explore for the most part. Level design is nothing to write home about if you compare it to its inspirations, but it serves its purpose.
Movement in the game, despite the roughness, is really satisfying. I personally enjoy how the pair control on land, they have the right weight and such. Swimming controls are a whole other topic; luckily the levels don't really feature nor require that much of it, if any (besides the first level, but it's short-lived).
Sound design is alright, despite hiccups here and there with the volume of certain footstep or collectible pick-up sounds.
Music is serviceable, but in my opinion, leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to memorability... I can't really remember any of the tracks besides the villain leitmotif that some songs have in them.
Character designs are appealing and is one of my most liked aspects of the game, but I can't personally fully vibe with Clive and Wrench's design that much... I guess they borrow too much from their inspirations? Still like it though.
Despite that, there are also quite, in my opinion, egregious negatives about the game:
The big elephant in the room is the performance; I don't have a particularly powerful machine, but it's no slouch either, and despite that, it ran poorly even at Medium settings. I find performance to be a big thing to nail in platformers, so this soured the experience quite a bit when the game started lagging out of nowhere.
Another thing is...the lack of testing (I want to avoid the word "polish" in this instance; it feels most of the issues stem from the game needing more extensive testing); multiple things kept popping up, such as weird/inconsistent hitboxes, inconsistent framerates on random objects in the world or enemies, NPCs playing their "Banjo babble" even if you don't talk to them randomly, the Hub intro scene playing every single time (which, even if it was intentional, got old after a while)... and the most egregious being that my main collectible counter missed 2 Pocket Watches (main collectible of the game) after 100%ing the game despite all the level tallies on the Hub showing full completion, which forced me to exploit a glitch with a respawning breakable jar just to be able to get to the secret level and get all Achievements. Issues like these keep piling up and are hard to ignore at times.
There's a severe lack of options: no controller remapping, being unable to change the graphics settings while in-game (you're only able to do it in the main menu screen), only being able to lower the Music volume...?
Also a menu to track the progress of all the levels (just like Spyro 1 has, for example) would've been nice.
Hoping that all this gets ironed out, because if so, this would be a rather enjoyable game I'd have no real qualms about.
I'm not that good at writing reviews but I hope this is useful somehow.