This of the side platforms in the indie scene already borders on the overflow. The most recurrent genre of downloadable titles begins to saturate in such a way that anything is no longer useful for us to talk about a remarkable and recommendable product.
This is not the case of Cloudberry Kingdom , a nth game of lateral jumps with two-dimensional graphics and sprites but that has among its bases a unique appeal: breakthrough difficulty . It is not original, it is not innovative, it is not unique …
but it generates a fun and addiction as we have not seen in the Wii U eShop, the PSN Store or the Live Bazaar. Funded through Kickstarter
and with versions for PC, 360, PS3, PSVita and Wii U, this work wants to give the player the necessary tools so that each challenge supposes a hard test of self-improvement, all in a frame of cartoons, castles and dangerous traps. And with a control as strange as simplified.
PWNEE Studios presents in this game to Bob , an ugly and anodyne character of aesthetic meme that seeks to be nothing more than the avatar to control within the more than 200 levels -shorts- of the story and all that the game is generating randomly in the Arcade mode, because this is another of his incentives to become more durable and adapt to the player. In front of Bob is Klobber ,
the villain who holds in his castle the bored Princessand has the powers of the Orb. And a little more, from this medieval approach so recurrent and nod to Super Mario our bald protagonist will travel valleys, caves, mountains and skies until you reach the last tower.
Of course, all these environments will be full of snare traps, fire, laser beams, slippery surfaces and deadly cliffs, especially deadly cliffs.
Constant tiny surfaces where to support Bob is a task of concentration and reflexes. This is Cloudberry Kingdom.
For his advance Bob just has to jump, calculate and dodge, without any of the mechanisms that will try to hunt him touch, neither the rival animals or the pointy shapes of the stage itself.
There are no living hearts or damage counters, here an error means death and return to the last checked point, not necessarily on the road and often difficult to reach. The blue currencies are the points for the player, who can also share the game with three other users offline on the same screen,
in a local multiplayer mode that does not really contribute anything except to go through the phases in company, there are not even collisions or interaction between the 4 characters. A curiosity that can make us laugh, but nothing more.
A jetpack to fly a few meters, a wooden horse with spring that makes us jump without stopping, a cardboard box that hinders the jumps or a wheel that makes Bob slip a lot … there is everything in the levels of Cloudberry Kingdom and we will not always find the item we were expecting, further increasing an already extraordinary difficulty due to the narrowness of the
gaps that are left by the phases, full of enemies and traps on very, very small platforms where they can fall with precision. And that, the precision, is not an easy task in a handling of the character so rough and basic as this, which makes him look like he is levitating
instead of jumping, like a sprite of a doll moved on the background upwards and the side that is , but without any noteworthy impulses or physics.
In Arcade mode scores and lives matter. The levels are generated randomly, so we will never visit it twice, although they are very similar.
Not too inspired or fresh may seem also the artistic section, which does not take advantage of neither the graphic nor the aesthetic. On the one hand, the traps and designs are repeated again and again, also the level funds or the tricks to get to the limit.
On the other, the use of shapes and color are nothing that we have not seen in other similar productions, there is no search for the suggestive or the memorable. Simply Cloudberry Kingdom plays to make a path to Bob that the player must overcome, hence also the
random generator of levels. And about Bob, he never changes his form, only when he is equipped with objects. It moves around the stage but with a few animations, without any search for coherence or credibility, although this is part of the attraction of the title
