Gunman Clive – Review
Looking for artistical Megaman-like platformer? Then Gunman Clive might just be the game for you! Find out if its any good in this review.
So I never heard of this game before but it recently popped up on Steams new releases tab and it caught my eye since it only costs 2$. Yeah 2$ as a release price. Can’t be any good can it? Wrooooong. It actually is fun! It kinda feels and plays like the old Megaman games so if you didn’t like those chances are you won’t like Gunman Clive either.
Gunman Clive can be frustrating at times because it suffers from the same weaknesses as Megaman. Everything and everyone in this game tries to murder you. Even the ducks and pelicans. And whenever someone or something hits you you get bounced back. I’ve never liked this game mechanic and I probably never will. Especially in the later levels getting hit often means immediate death since you often get bounced back into an abyss or spike trap. You can ease the frustration by playing on the easy difficulty though. On easy you don’t die immediately after falling into an abyss, you lose some health and get to try the same passage again. If you play on the other difficulties though you need to replay the whole level, no more matter where you’ve died. That sounds worse than it is though since you can usually complete each level in a minute.
So you can tell that this game is meant to be played on a smartphone or handheld while being on the road and it you kinda have to cope with that if you want to play it on your PC.
The story of the game is as shallow as it can possibly be. Girl gets kidnapped, you rescue the girl. That’s it. But who would expect a good story in a platformer anyway?
It’s also a very short game. It took me one hour to complete it on the normal difficulty. So if you play it on easy it will probably be over even faster. But there is some replayability in the game. Once you’ve completed it you can replay it as a duck which can’t attack but fly instead. You can also try to beat every level without getting hit and beating a certain time to get a star.
I’m an achievement hunter. So naturally this makes me one of those players who replay a game once they’ve completed it to get everything . But Gunman Clive has some huge game designs issues when it comes to getting the achievements. You need to speedrun each level to get a star but you have no idea what time you actually have to beat. So you complete a level over and over and you have no idea how close you are to actually beating the time. That’s very frustrating. What adds to this frustration is that there is no restart option. WHY DID NO ONE NOTICE THAT? Imagine this:
So you try to speedrun a level.
You notice that you are probably too slow to beat the time and want to start over.
Now you go to the menu and you see three glorious options: Resume, Options and Quit.
So you hit quit.
This brings you to the title screen.
Then you chose to play.
Then you have to select your save file.
Then you have to select the level.
And then you can start over.
I really hope that I’m simply too dumb to find the restart option but then again this would mean that the game has usability issues.
As I’ve already mentioned, there is also an achievement for not getting hit in each world. So when you actually do get hit you naturally would want to restart the game. Which you can’t without going to the main menu… I’d love to get those achievements but I don’t want to spend half of my playtime going through the menus to restart my game. Fuck that.
Despite all my hate towards the achievements the overall feeling Gunman Clive left me with is that it’s total worth its asking price for what it is. The cell-shaded-hand-drawn style of the game still looks good in HD and the music and sounds are cute and fit the overall theme. Go pick it up if you’re into this type of games (and don’t care about the achievements).
