NEEDS A FEW BOLTS TIGHTENED.

Clive ‘N’ Wrench is a 3D platformer collect-a-thon that failed to make its Kickstarter amount back in 2015 and had floated around on Steam Greenlight for a while before that so I’ve known of this game’s existence for quite some time. I was hoping that with how long this game had been in the cooker it would be better but it’s not… great. In fact, it’s not good.

If we lived in a world where 3D platformer collect-a-thons were still a dead genre then I could maybe see this filling a niche and when this game was put on Kickstarter Yooka-Laylee had only finished within the last year so that was the case. In the interim between then and now, we’ve had plenty of independent 3D platformers as well as AAA 3D platformers. All of these games are either inspired by or built off of the pillars of this genre and Clive ‘N’ Wrench feels as if it acknowledges what made those games great but fails to actually understand why those games are great.

PLATFORMS: SWITCH, PC, PS4, PS5, XB1, XSX
MSRP: $29.99
PRICE I’D PAY: $9.99

My first issue may seem like a nitpick but Clive and Wrench, who lack any sort of notable character, are a rabbit and monkey duo and I have no idea why. Most duos serve some function but the story is poorly told in general so it’s not like Clive is silent and Wrench needs to do the talking like Daxter does for Jak. Wrench doesn’t really help other than glide jumps which could have been solved using anything that could be swung so he’s not Kazooie, or Clank, or even Redmond the rabbit from Whiplash who is used in a similar fashion and also a mace and also the voice of the duo and also a puzzle solving tool. It seems as if the whole reason he’s a monkey is so the joke can be made that Clive has a “monkey on his back.” Sure, fine, Rare would do these types of jokes too but never to a point where I question if that’s where a lot of the work went.

In the first level Clive and Wrench run around a room at a miniature size and it was neat but textures seem cobbled together, Clive and Wrench sometimes looked out of place which is weird cause stylistic cohesion is generally not what I’m thinking about when playing a platformer. There’s these records all over the stage and they are all really cool parodies of real album covers and those album covers were clearly made with a lot of attention which make things like an overly detailed pizza slice stand out when clearly that same attention wasn’t put into it. Same with certain animations the characters have. Sometimes they are extremely fluid and other times they feel off. It also is weird to see some characters be so well designed while enemies are so awful looking to the point where I guess they are gremlins but I don’t really know; they are just things to hit. All these issues continued on into the next level too, so this wasn’t simply the issue in the first stage.

The second problem I have is the main concern; this game feels bad to play. Jumping feels bad. Attacking feels bad. That’s the whole game. It is immediately a bad sign when the tutorial is hard to pass because the jumping controls are bad. I don’t want to say they are unresponsive but the input for the long jump had me just rolling off platforms despite clearly hitting the buttons. So platforming in the platformer doesn’t feel good, what about the combat? Well, it’s a simple spin attack to hit the enemy but it never feels like it connects, there’s little feedback, and I almost always take damage too. Swimming is also bad so no escape into the water either. This sort of falls back into my first point but it feels like the idea for a 3D platformer and all the little jokes were made before the actual game. There’s also audio issues and technical problems. I got stuck in a wall in the second level and after trying to push my way through I just wasn’t having fun and used that as a sign to stop playing.

So despite my breakdown I want to say that this was mainly made by one person, which is a feat. I would argue that Silactro also is a solo dev and makes better pastiches of the same genre, but I also want to be fair because I don’t think this game is unsalvageable. While I don’t expect major changes to my first issue, I do think the second issue of technical problems can be ironed out so in case the dev reads this, I will redo this review if the game is fixed (whenever that may be). As for right now though I cannot recommend this to anyone when better games trying to for the same things are readily accessible, cheaper, and more successful at doing being a 3D platformer.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.