Game Reviews

Clash of Puppets

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Clash of Puppets
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Clash of Puppets is one of those games that does absolutely nothing to stand out.

It's warmly generic, never doing anything that might shock or surprise you, but at the same time never shifting into uncomfortable or unplayable territory.

If it was a flavour it would be vanilla. If it was a colour it would be magnolia. It's not offensively bad, nor is it wondrously good. It just is.

And while you might find some enjoyment in the brief time you spend with it, there are countless other games that deserve your attention more.

Cut the strings

The game mixes a twin-stick shooter with a 3D platformer, then tips it into a painfully linear mould. You're herded down walled-in corridors, tasked with shooting a variety of angry creatures, and solving far-from taxing box-pushing puzzles.

There are moving platforms, spikes, and lava puddles to avoid, all presented in solid but underwhelming chunky cartoon-ish graphics.

You run around with a stick on the left of the screen, and shoot with one on the right. There are also buttons on the right to deal with jumping and hitting things with your melee weapons.

Every now and then your thumbs will stumble into the wrong spot and you'll jump instead of shoot, but it's a pretty rare occurrence.

Everything about the game feels like it wouldn't be out of place on an early PlayStation One title. It doesn't clunk so much as creak, and all of its ideas are based on ones that have been played out a thousand times before.

There's nothing mechanically wrong here, it's just that there's nothing fresh. You stumble through corridors blocked off by walls you should be able to jump over, collecting coins, fixing switches, and hitting vampires with a baseball bat.

It's a puppet

It makes for a far from edifying experience. Despite the spooky setting there's nothing scary here, and while there's a bit of a challenge, you'll breeze through most of the game in a couple of hours.

Clash of Puppets is a game that skirts just above mediocrity, happy to trade on old ideas and old gameplay to create a solid, playable, but ultimately forgettable addition to the ever-growing stock of utterly average App Store games.

Clash of Puppets

A bland and unremarkable game, Clash of Puppets isn't broken, but it's far from memorable all the same
Score
Harry Slater
Harry Slater
Harry used to be really good at Snake on the Nokia 5110. Apparently though, digital snake wrangling isn't a proper job, so now he writes words about games instead.