Some time ago I played/streamed a fun little free game by the name of Super Truck. It was a joke title inspired by the game Super Hot if you didn’t guess by the name. While it was nothing but a fun little joke, it was still loads of fun. Now we get a complete game from that little freebie in the form of Clustertruck. The goal in Clustertruck is quite simple: You jump from truck to truck and attempt to make it to the goal at the end. It’s about as simplistic as it gets, but the game works so well that it’s more enjoyable that most major games released this year.
“Clustertruck is one of the most wacky gaming experiences of the year”
The game is broken up across ten themed worlds, each filled with ten sub-levels that you must beat before moving on. Everything starts out deceptively easy, but as you progress you’ll find yourself cursing the game in the most amazing of ways. Clustertruck is brutal in how it lays out many of its level and you’ll come to know death like an old friend. But no matter how many times you fail, you always want to reset and give the game another go.
Gameplay is really simple and sees you controlling some sort of small ninja truck? We don’t really know what we are, but I like to imagine this entire thing as simply being the demo reel of actor Jason Statham. The trucks themselves are always in motion and your job involves you bounding between each in an attempt to make it to the finish. It sounds really easy, and at first it is, but don’t get fooled into a false sense of superiority as Clustertruck really knows how to crank things up to eleven.
Each level ramps up the challenge by adding obstacles and traps that can kill you or knock off the trucks you are jumping across. Sometimes the world itself will be out to get you as environmental issues like earthquakes and the like will cause you great pain. Even better is that these hazards are all based around the world you are in. In the medieval world you are dealing with battering rams and torture devices, while the science fiction world sees you navigating lasers and jump jets.
All of this would make for a lovely enough game, but Clustertruck adds a lot of extra content that makes it really special. As you progress you’ll earn points for completing levels and doing sick tricks along the way. These can be spent to unlock tools and abilities that can help you throughout the game. These unlocks can completely change how the game plays, even if you go back and play levels you’ve already completed.
You can unlock the ‘Double Jump’ which, in my opinion, is the best ability in the game, an old ‘Jetpack, or even a ‘Grappling Hook’. These tools really change things up and can get you out of a jam in a real hurry. When you aren’t screaming about dying you’ll be screaming in joy from an amazing save you just pulled off thanks to one of these.
The abilities are secondary (you can have one of each active at any given time), but also help turn the game on its head. These include the power to slow down time, drop a truck in front of you, or simply activate ‘Super Truck’ mode where everything just gets silly. It’s all great fun and the game is designed perfectly to be played with friends on Twitch.
Clustertruck also includes built-in Twitch integration that you can activate in the options menu. This allows you to let your chat vote on random occurrences that can either help or hinder your progress. Are you doing really well? Maybe chat decides to vote to active a persistent earthquake. Perhaps you are stuck on a harder level and they vote to activate wide trucks so you have more room, or add lasers to every truck that fucks you over, or even set every truck you touch to explode within seconds of touching it.
The music is also really good, and while you probably won’t be humming along to the tunes once the game is over, each world has solid music that fits really well. Everything about Clustertruck is built around one simple premise –Fun. This is the sort of game that removes everything and leaves only the basic underlying mechanic for us to work with. It’s development done right because if your games mechanic isn’t enough to carry it, then you can add all the high-end graphics, story, features you want, but it’s not going to cover up that simple shortcoming.
Clustertruck isn’t a long game, even with 100 levels to test yourself with. Depending on your skill the game will only take you a few hours, but those few hours are a complete blast. I’d much rather have a short game that is non-stop fun than a 30-hour adventure that ends up feeling flat. But if you do want more truck jumping when you finish, the game offers full Steam Workshop support so you can make, play, and share your own stupidly hard levels. Clustertruck is almost like the Super Mario Maker for the PC crowd.
While Clustertruck is pure truck jumping fun, it does have a few very minor issues. There are still some bugs present that can get in the way of a good run. Sometimes collision detection freaks out and you, or a truck, will go flying off into another direction at warp speed. You’ll also sometimes get stuck someplace you shouldn’t when bounding about. If you touch anything other than a truck you will die, but there were times when I landed on something and was completely okay. Stuck in limbo, sure, but completely okay.
At the end of the day Clustertruck is one of the most wacky gaming experiences of the year and comes highly recommended. When developers focus on the fun instead of trying to impress investors and critics, you end up getting something really special. Pick this one up as you won’t be disappointed.
4/5
‘Great’
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