Jump. Jump. Slow Time, pivot in the air, the truck below is about to flip. Wait one, bounce off airborne truck, realise target truck is not going to be fast enough. Slow time. Grapple to trucks packed together. Bounce. Jump. Sprint jump to clear the goal. One level in Clustertruck. Maybe ten seconds of gameplay.
How fast can you react?
Clustertruck is a fast paced first person platforming game developed by Landfall Games and published by tinyBuild Games. The player starts on top of a convoy of erratically moving trucks. They can’t touch the environment objects or the floor. They must reach a goal at the end of the level as quick as possible. That’s the core gameplay objective.
In theory, the player can just ride the starting truck to the goal. But that’s not fast. Or fun.
Or in some cases possible, as the trucks are incredibly susceptible to physics based interference, bouncing off rocks and trees and divots in the path.
In Clustertruck, The player can jump, use a sprint to jump further distances, or slowly slide the side of trucks by holding the jump button. Whilst airborne, they can make minor adjustments in control of momentum, but not direction. The difficulty comes in anticipating the speed of the trucks that the player is jumping between.
Well, half the difficulty. The rest comes from a huge variety of obstacles designed in levels. Most of these are physics based, designed to interact with the trucks. Hammers swing across the path, sweeping trucks away. Boulders roll down hills to force the player to constantly keep jumping to safe trucks.
And trucks will sometimes start opposite your starting convoy and ram. Or they’ll start above you and rain down on the player.
These physics based obstacles are almost always clearly visible from the start of the level, giving players a chance to anticipate what’s coming and try and prepare.
The rest are physical barriers and environment jumps. These will often require the player to make leaps to new convoys and paths. Mostly, these are well signposted and easy to work out the developers intended path. Some later levels are a little trickier to discern, especially when they introduce brand new concepts for one level only.
My only real issue is that some of the levels feel like they go on a touch too long to justify restarting upon death. Especially when the physics of the trucks react unexpectedly and launch the player directly at a wall or floor. Sometimes, with the more complicated levels, this can be a real issue as more and more happens quickly. The player’s level of control doesn’t always match up with how much action they need to be on top of. It’s frustrating at times, but is almost always dependent on how complex the level is.
Speaking of levels, there are ninety built into the game at launch. Ten levels each split across nine worlds, each with a thematic design like desert, forest, mediaeval and sci-fi. These are mostly focussed on introducing one or two types of obstacle to learn to challenge. Each world also features a new music track as accompaniment. These are designed to be fast paced and suitable for multiple repeat listens as the player constantly and quickly restarts the level.
After each level ends the game displays your time to reach the goal, as well as your score for doing tricks and providing bonuses if you completed the level on your first attempt. Thus, the game encourages replayability and challenging your friend’s times. An option to play against player ghosts reinforces that.
And what reward is there beyond player satisfaction? The in game abilities. One tool, and one ability.
Abilities include slowing time, stopping all trucks dead and using a SuperHot style time only moves when you do feature.
Tools include jetpacks, grappling hooks, teleporting and more.
These cost in game score points to purchase, and are set to timers for use in levels.
The tools are all fine, but the game doesn’t do much to encourage you to experiment beyond what you initially like. When I was playing, I found my style suited the grappling hook and slow time combo. Later, when I was getting stuck on levels, I’d try switching to see if that would help. All this did was frustrate me further as I had to try and beat a difficult level and also learn how to compensate for the new abilities. It seemed like I would need to go back to the start of a given world, and replay while I learned the new skill set.
The nine worlds of Clustertruck don’t take forever to complete, each running about half an hour of game time with a reasonable skill level.
In order to increase the longevity of the game, the developers have included a Level editor.
Starting with a fairly standard tutorial, the tutorial allows for a player to have a reasonably designed level working in a few minutes. These can then be uploaded to the Steam Workshop for easy access by other players. At time of writing, the selection is… Poor. However, I’m sure that with time a community will actually spring up and take things a little more seriously.
The community outreach also feeds into the game’s efforts with Streaming, allowing Twitch integration. Want to have the chat add increased difficulty by starting earthquakes or turning up the gravity? All possible. Community encouragement is always a good idea, and hopefully this will help maintain a steady stream of new workshop maps for streamers and regular players to enjoy.
After two or three levels, Clustertruck should have a player hooked. The combination of speed, physics based havoc and bouncy controls give this game a real sense of personality. The arcade style structure encourages the player to come back time and again, revisiting the challenges and improving their skills. At its core, the game is fun. Sometimes fiddly controls and frustrating levels will impede the player’s enjoyment but the game is simple enough at the core to make those concerns minor. What I’m hoping is that it has the community to back up the game and extend it into the future. I think it will.
ClusterTruck is now available on PC, PS4 and will soon be available on Xbox One for £10.99