Clive ‘n’ Wrench é uma verdadeira carta de amor aos grandes games de plataforma dos anos 90, misturando tudo que havia de melhor neles. Simples, cativante, extremamente divertido e com uma trilha sonora viciante, ele acaba sendo um prato cheio para os fãs do gênero. Apesar de não escapar de problemas, Clive ‘n’ Wrench consegue mostrar muito potencial e, acima de tudo, nos transporta de volta para a era de ouro do gênero.

Review completa em: https://psxbrasil.com.br/analise/clive-n-wrench-review/

While it's less "retro-feeling 3D platformer on a similar level as Banjo-Kazooie" and more "retro-feeling 3D platformer that evokes the same feelings as those random N64 games you'd pick up at Blockbuster like Gex 64 or A Bug's Life", I'm man enough to admit that this is 100% My Jam. I know when I'm being catered to, especially now that the game's hovering around the 10-20 dollar mark.

Clive 'N' Wrench is the latest of passion project collectathon 3D platformers starring a wacky little critter made by people who grew up in the 90's to appeal to other people who grew up in the 90's. While most of these 3D platformers borrow influence from the N64 greats, what sets this particular game apart is that it feels more PSX-influenced in its mechanics. Rob is a huge Muppet Monster Adventure, Spyro, and MediEvil fan, and it definitely shows up in the DNA of the game.

But is it a "good" game? Well...probably not. But my feelings are complicated.

As stated in a previous review, I have a bit of a soft spot for janky platformers as long as they aren't boring or feel like they're intentionally wasting my time (looking at YOU, Balan Wonderworld). Clive 'N' Wrench passes my Game Feel test, even if the whole game experience feels a little undercooked. Ironically, the lack of polish, ugly graphics/textures, and general jank feel to it makes it feel more like a PS1/N64 platformer than Yooka-Laylee ever did. Damning the game with faint praise, I know, but it's hard to describe this perfect blend of Odd Choices That Should've Been Ironed Out More beyond "yeah, this is what gaming in the Clinton Years felt like". Some levels just have 1000 of a single collectible for no reason at all but damnit if it isn't making me smile.

I think what Rob nailed was the movement tech in this game. I like that Clive just has a ridiculously high jump with a hover reminiscent of Spyro's glide in that you could just traverse through an entire stage provided you gave yourself enough height at the start of the glide. It makes the game rather easy, but I like turning each play area into a jungle gym. Sadly, the movement tech didn't translate into Clive-Wrench's attack moveset, leaving them with only a wimpy little spin attack that I could never quite feel out the hitbox for, meaning that I usually took damage whenever I attacked an enemy. But, as I said, this game IS pretty easy so deaths were more of a temporary annoyance than a setback.

My one major complaint (beyond "yeah fine I guess the game could've used a bigger budget/team to make a much better product") is that none of the characters feel all that interesting. I like how you see the bosses' influence within the worlds as a result of their partnership with the main villain - and I think the character design, concept and names are all fun - but then it's missing that extra Sly Cooper-y spice of them having some witty banter with our heroes. I can't believe this game manages to fumble a goofy mad scientist, a bayou witch frog that runs a casino, and a vampire named "Vlad the Impala" this badly by having them all be completely silent. Doesn't help that the boss battles range from completely terrible (Baroness Samedice) to It's Okay But Could've Been Longer (Vlad) and the boss levels range from That's Fine (The Unitaur) to The Actual Worst Thing In This Entire Game (Captain Bluebeard).

In the end, it's rough around the edges and wasn't worth its original asking price of 40 dollars, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having fun with this goofy little game. Even if the models are kinda scary-looking.

Also what a massive power move to just include Kensington and the Museum from MediEvil 2 in your video game. The events of MediEvil are canon to Clive 'N' Wrench and I think that's beautiful.

The best way to describe it is that it's a "Kusoge Platformer"

It's got alot of jank, it's unoptimized, and the final bosses suck (yes all 3)

But movement controls are fun and it's got charm to pull through, but I can't recommend it.

I want to like Clive N Wrench. Trust me, I’ve followed this game almost since whispers of its inception in 2011 and its resultant failed Kickstarter campaign in 2015; it’s a miracle that somehow we still got a finished product after all this time. Yet, despite over a decade consisting of various degrees of development hell, Clive N Wrench is one of the most undercooked 3D platformers that I have ever played in my life. I so desperately want to give this game the love and attention it deserves and recommend it to all my friends remotely interested in the indie collectathon revival… but I can’t.

Where do we even begin? Clive N Wrench suffers from a slew of strange technical and design issues, and to go over all of them in detail would probably take another separate review. So here’s a quick listing of everything that I noticed over my playthrough (and there’s probably more that I’m missing):

- Destructible objects and ragdolled “defeated” enemies behave at a different frame rate than the in-game frame rate, so they will fly wildly upon hit and their models can often spaz out and distort/elongate into Longachu-esque forms while clipping into surfaces.
- Projectiles sometimes fail to unspawn after a certain amount of time, and running into them will still damage you.
- Collecting an ancient stone (the equivalent of Power Stars/Shines) puts you in an unskippable collecting animation cutscene, but you can still take damage and die while in this state.
- Poor AI for enemies means that they don’t know how to path upon spotting you besides running in a straight line, so enemies get stuck on walls and corners all the time.
- Some objects just straight up lack geometry and solidity.
- The climbing animation when climbing poles runs at a different frame rate than in-game. So, the climbing animation appears to lag while going up/down and the result is this, where the model appears to vibrate into the pole. This is recorded at 60 FPS by the way while the game runs at 144 FPS: on my 144 Hz monitor, this effect is exacerbated and Clive turned into this black blurry blob of a rough outline and it actually gave me minor motion sickness focusing on the climbing.
- Some random pushable/contactable objects in the overworld that serve no purpose other than being mobile (such as the tennis balls in the first world) do not properly respond to collision and behave erratically.
- Most sloped vertical surfaces don’t actually cause any slippage via friction or present any barriers to movement, so you can walk up and stand on just about anything. No, that's not an exaggeration.
- Sometimes these sloped surfaces have obvious invisible protrusions, so you can stand in mid-air.
- There was an enemy completely submerged under death water that was shooting me with arrows whom I could not touch, despite the fact that all other enemies died upon contact with the death water.
- When adjusting the camera near walls, it will pop out of the environment, so you can see the infinite expanse outside of the level walls.
- You can’t adjust the camera upwards without the camera getting uncomfortably close to your character.
- There’s no way to adjust camera sensitivity, and it’s really, really slow.
- For that matter, there’s no way to adjust most of the settings (no FOV slider, no brightness slider, no frame rate limiter, etc), much less tinker with exact graphical specifications on PC.
- You also can’t adjust text scroll speed, and the built-in speed is super slow. But you also can’t just press X to skip to the end of the dialogue, because that closes out of the dialogue box!
- The right trigger handles camera reset while RB is used to crouch/ground-pound/dive, which feels backwards to me given that the latter is used way more often. Similarly, LB is held down a lot to run while the left trigger does… nothing. Sure would be nice to rebind this, but you can’t rebind controls whatsoever!
- Some characters will have a context sensitive “Y” prompt above their heads when you can’t actually talk to them (so Y does nothing).
- Every time Clive runs over the edge of a platform, he will short hop. Not full jump or fall down from gravity, but rather short hop. This interfered with my habit of timing my full jump right before running off the edge, and caused my double jump input to be eaten early so many times, resulting in tons of dumb deaths.
- You can’t skip the intro cutscene of Clive jumping out the time machine and the resulting cutscene camera pan over the level introduction, no matter if you’ve completed the level or not. Expect to see this a lot.
- The landing animation doesn’t always activate immediately on surfaces, so Clive will sometimes “glide” for several seconds before finally stagnating and landing.
- There’s a certain boss run level that forces you into a narrow linear corridor and locks your camera while platforming multiple times; adjusting the camera left or right during any of these segments will cause the camera to do a complete 180 (while you’re in mid-air or on a collapsible platform by the way). Also, you can’t perceive depth very well because it’s a straight-on horizontal camera angle and you can’t tilt the camera up or down during these sections. Fun!
- The 2nd boss of the game shakes the table that the boss fight takes place upon a ton, and is extremely nauseating.
- The game’s physics while on rapidly rotating circular platforms are very messed up; Clive will correctly slow to a crawl while walking in the direction against rotation, but then also slow to a crawl while walking in the direction of rotation instead of accelerating and similarly feel restrained while walking towards/away from the center of rotation. Basically, you have to jump like a hot potato to meaningfully move on any rotating platform.
- The game is optimized extremely poorly; at high settings, it was still dipping below 60 FPS in random environments (not necessarily because of heavy object spawn or large loading distances) and because game logic is actually tied to in-game frame rate, this often meant collision and ragdoll physics felt extremely inconsistent between 144 and >60 FPS. For context, I'm playing this on PC with a GTX 3070.

Beyond all this lack of polish however, lies one fundamental issue; the game is just too easy. Clive can gain considerable height with a quick backflip/sideflip (quickly change directions with the left joystick and then jump) and then double jump into infinite glide/hover with Wrench. This maneuver can basically be used for 75% of the jumps in the game, and the other 25% can be cleared with simple dash into double jump. For context, it would be like if you were playing Super Mario Sunshine and 75% of the jumps were just spin jump/sideflip into the hover nozzle with infinite water. There’s no satisfying “efficient” speed tech in the game, because there’s no “low-and-long movement” option like a long jump or the dive from A Hat in Time. There’s not much challenge to necessitate this movement either; one egregious example is in the pirate level, where two ancient stones are located within visible sight of one another, both upon tall stone watchtowers that can be platformed between within one minute. The vast majority of challenges are just some degree of repeating the same jumps within this mostly open world of scattered collectibles, many of which are presented as the exact same type of objective. As a result, platforming begins to feel pretty rote once you’re an hour or more into the game… which rather defeats the purpose of a collectathon 3D platformer wouldn’t you say?

What really serves to hammer the nail in the coffin though, is that Clive N Wrench lacks charm. I cannot recall any of the songs on the soundtrack; most sounded quite a bit like generic Creative Commons elevator music (I would make the comparison to Kevin MacLeod’s work, but that would be rude to Kevin MacLeod) in short loops of a couple of minutes or less. NPCs don’t really offer any interesting dialogue or have any body to their personality beyond generic questing descriptions and some quick one-liners. Similarly, Clive N Wrench themselves don’t really have any notable personality quirks (you’ll be very disappointed if you’re trying to make comparisons to the banter of Banjo and Kazooie) and have basically no input upon their roles in the narrative. Speaking of narrative, the intro cutscene has no dialogue and is vaguely pantomimed out while the rest of the story is told here and there with sparse dialogue boxes; you’ll probably understand the story more from the Steam Store description alone. The time travel theming just feels rather weak; besides the lack of atmosphere from distinct level elements and tunes, they’re all over the place with the level inspirations (how the hell does a Toy Story 2 Andy’s House rip-off level fit into meddling with time travel?) Finally, the game is unfortunately rather hideous and the characters look like discount Five Nights At Freddy’s animatronics... but there’s no horror to be found except from how bland everything looks!

I’ll give one concession to the developers here: I really appreciate the utility of the in-game stopwatch detector to help you hunt down those last collectibles, and they also made sure to plant destructible vases containing stopwatches next to important switches and objectives so you’ll be able to easily track down remnants without excessively struggling for that completion. Unfortunately, this game aged like milk within the 11 hours that it took me to snag everything, and I honestly can’t see myself going back any time soon given the lack of both personality and gameplay depth. I do hope that the developers listen to the early reviews and fix up all the technical issues, because it would be a shame if this was how the story ended after all this time… but good god, I still can’t get over that art style. I swear it’s not that complicated to make 3D platformers look crisp guys, we figured this out all the way back in 2000!

Stumbled across this in a second-hand shop for €12, which sounded a heckuva lot more enticing than the 30 it normally goes for on the eShop, and while I think it's a bit cringe to evaluate games by whatever price you get them for, I reckon that's pretty good considering that the game is large but ultimately just decent.

It set out to be a tribute to classic late 90s 3D platformers, but I think it ended up more successfully emulating the lesser-known, well-intentioned imitators of their day. Undeniably has a personality and a sense of playfulness about itself, plenty of big levels full of stuff to do, even plays moderately okay. But stages are perhaps a bit bloated, combat's workable yet busted, and the music just doesn't quite work out. less Banjo-Kazooie & Spyro and more Stuart Little 2 & Kao the Kangaroo (sorry to fans of the latter two lol).

Still, that's an equally worthwhile result in its own right, especially considering this thing was in the works for a decade and almost entirely made by one guy. It's a miracle this even exists in the first place, and that it's a pretty alright game too. I can't say I've got a whole lot of affection for it, though I enjoyed exploring levels a fair bit. It scratched an itch I had for that style of collectathon many of those aforementioned imitators often excelled at in spite of everything, and maybe I can recommend it on that account.

I feel like a jerk ragging on this game since it was made by one person over the course of 10 years but man does this just feel like every other mid platformer trying to recapture the charm of the 5th gen platformers. In this game's case it has the general moveset down to a science and controlling Clive is the absolute best part of the game. On the other hand you have the rest of it. Very bland open areas with collectibles just scattershock around the map without all that much thought even down to the main collectibles feeling really slapted in. The biggest problem this game has is it’s obscene lack of polish, any charme this game was trying to go for is honestly none existent mostly because of how unpolished the whole game is along with having some genuinely bad looking characters that border on FNAF looking monsters. I’m not gonna list everything I’ve encouraged but using the “𝓢𝓣𝓡𝓜 𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓭: 𝓑𝓾𝓰𝓰𝔂 𝓥𝓲𝓭𝓮𝓸 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓮 𝓢𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓮”, it’s about in between Morrowind and Oblivion. (for more information on the 𝓢𝓣𝓡𝓜 𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓭: 𝓑𝓾𝓰𝓰𝔂 𝓥𝓲𝓭𝓮𝓸 𝓖𝓪𝓶𝓮 𝓢𝓬𝓪𝓵𝓮, context me on my Friendster page).

Again I really don’t like being mean to most indie games, especially ones that took such a stupidly long time to make, but in a case like this I feel like this game really needed a few more months in the oven before it was ready. I’m disappointed but not in an angry way, more in a disappointed parent sort of way.

Looks like crap, runs like crap, sounds like crap, and the gameplay simply isn't fun. In other collectathons like Banjo Kazooie, Mario Odyssey, or even Here Comes Niko! it felt like you actually earned the main collectibles. They were either placed at the end of a challenging platforming segment or were a reward for completing some kind of task.

With Clive and Wrench, you're just wandering around these open areas and finding them scattered in seemingly random spots, which just makes them feel cheap and makes the gameplay loop boring. I can put up with the frame drops, annoying sound effects, nonexistant story, lackluster visuals, and lack of basic quality of life features, but if the core gameplay isn't fun, there's not much that can save this thing