There’s also no real feeling of weight in the player, with nothing to confirm that you’ve landed on a truck other than the fact you aren’t dead, and nothing to give you a sense of your size until you think you’ve cleared a jump and immediately die from barely grazing your hitbox. The first-person perspective feels disconnected, with no sense of an actual model or character or anything other than a floating camera. The physical, player-controlled gameplay of Clustertruck didn’t do me any favors either. This kind of random, meaningless death came to exemplify my experience playing Clustertruck, with the majority of my many, many failures resulting from the absolutely unpredictable nature of the game. The second time around, I remained stationary to avoid the branch, but was promptly wiped out by a sudden truck careening into me from somewhere off-screen, dooming me to death by branch if I jumped to avoid it and death by truck if I didn’t. My mistake the game had played me like a fiddle, but I didn’t mind. The first time I saw this branch, I predictably jumped. In the next level, that same set-up is used again, but now the branch is high enough that you simply avoid it by staying still. An early level in this forest has you jump in order to to avoid a low-hanging branch in the path of your trucks. Take, for example, the forested “World 2” of Clustertruck, which introduces branches, rocks, fences, and other objects to step up both the platforming and puzzle aspects of the game. Clustertruck hinges on the random and fickle behavior of the out-of-control semis, and expecting players to precisely jump across them creates scenarios which result in a lot of kill screens. It’s described by the developers as “a chaotic physics based truckformer,” which is another way of saying those fancy puzzle set-ups don’t mean diddly-squat, because the entire game lives or dies at the whim of its physics engine. While initial levels are fairly straightforward, the game gradually adds more obstacles, more mechanics, and more intricate puzzles.
Based on your performance in said levels, you rack up “style points,” which let you unlock various abilities. Funny how that happens, isn’t it?ĭeveloped by Landfall Games and published by tinyBuild, Clustertruck is a game about jumping across the back of a truck convoy as it moves towards the finish line in 90 levels across nine themed worlds. Replace “driving a bus” with “platforming across the backs of semi-trucks” and you get Clustertruck, a game which manages to fall flat for eerily similar reasons. What are the odds that I would be disappointed by two novelty vehicle-based games with punny names and chaotic set-ups in the same year? Back in May, there was Omnibus, a promisingly creative and hilarious game about driving a bus in a mad world of wild physics that was ultimately marred by expecting precision gameplay in a decidedly imprecise world.
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