This thesis is explored and tested through a simple premise. You, presumably human but certainly capable of jumping like a pre-1943 Superman, are dropped into a world and challenged with reaching a predefined goal at the end of a (mostly) linear path. You can’t touch the ground because that will kill you on truck planet. Instead, a convoy of semi trucks has been assembled and strategically deployed upon the path to the goal. You must successfully hop across these white emotionless rogues to make it across the finish line. Clustertruck presents ninety different chances spread across nine different worlds to do this.
It is difficult not to take one look at Clustertruck and feel an immediate call to adventure. Insane trucks are cascading across a desert (or a lush medieval wasteland, or a sleek disposable future) and you have to run and jump across them. It looks amazing and it seems to play even better. In a medium built on platforming challenges and increasingly defined by outrageous ideas, why hasn’t anyone thought to shift the aesthetic of an obstacle course to an enthusiastic barrage of death defying mayhem? Context is ancillary to gameplay, but in a genre bled of exhilarating reasons to move from point A to point B, Clustertruck is able to make its case in about eight seconds.
As expected, Clustertruck becomes more complicated than simply hopping across a fleet of trucks. The path may bend and the natural walls may tighten, forcing some of the idiot trucks to collide with a canyon wall (or each other, or the canyon wall and each other) and start exploding into chaos. Sometimes the trucks become airborne and sometimes they just stop moving. In either case you’re free to hop on dying trucks in mid-air and cover a serious among of ground. With enough personal speed comes the latent ability to clamber up the side of vertical surfaces, such as the rear end of a semi-truck. Or maybe that’s just a side effect of repeatedly mashing the jump button in a frenzied attempt to not die. I have no idea.
Before long, obstacles in the path start changing from questionable geography to diabolical contraptions. It starts simple with spinning wagon wheels and makeshift hurdles. Every ten levels brings a new theme, inviting such hazards as death ray lasers, giant pendulating meat tenderizers, buildings falling out of Inception, flamethrowers, gravitational launchers, and, of course, even more trucks in a variety of villainous positions. This severely complicates your intentions to reach the goal, requiring a significant refinement of hand-eye coordination and/or internal timing.
Clustertruck entrucks entrusts the player with a powerful amount of personal control. I think the game is reliant on an internal physics engine, ensuring there is some sort of consistency to the world, but it doesn’t come with the weird gravitational penalty of platformers like LittleBigPlanet. You have a convincing amount on in-air control, creating an ability to launch into the sky and modify your decent path at will. This is extremely important because Clustertruck’s first-person point of view doesn’t always leave room to see the ground you’re falling into. This level of awareness is a skill people having been acquiring since Metroid Prime and Mirror’s Edge, though it doesn’t make it any easier if it’s you’re first time with a game like this.
Because fortune favors the bold, Clustertruck comes equipped with a run button. If you think this sounds like an additional and unnecessary risk, you would be correct. A run button also (1) at least doubles the exhilaration factor of behaving like a suicidal mastermind, (2) helps climb the time based leaderboards, and (3) feels more in sync with how Clustertruck is intended to operate. With chaos piling up some levels are rendered impossible by just how clustertrucked the playing field becomes. This is annoying and perhaps technically a design flaw, but it’s also proper motivation to never let go of the run button.
Sometimes, however, it feels like you’re going to get a bad roll no matter what. Levels 8-6 and 8-8, for example, tend to ignore skill in favor of how fast/chaotic the trucks seem to be at the time you encounter them. While Clustertruck’s fast operation and quick-resets feel like Trials or Super Meat Boy, it isn’t tuned anywhere near as tightly as those two games. A level isn’t exactly the same every time you play it. This can be discouraging in a game that demands a considerable amount of precision, but it is also occurring in a game called Clustertruck. Its name and concept is, at best, an indication that it is occasionally going to be a cluster fuck and, at worst, a clever rationalization of its own instability.
Clustertruck provides a few tools to help frustrated players. Performing well in a level, either through completing spinning tricks or through speed bonuses, earns points. Points can be spent to unlock abilities, one of which can be equipped at a time. The most immediate and most valuable is a double jump, but it’s also possible to unlock abilities like an air dash, a poorly functioning jetpack, and a grappling hook. There are also utilities that don’t directly affect movement, like a bullet-time effect, an option to spawn a truck, freezing all the trucks, and one that apparently makes Clustertruck behave like Superhot. I haven’t tested many of those because completing the game once didn’t quite give me enough points to buy everything, but modding Clustertruck with in-game tools sounds like a hoot.
Clustertruck shares part of the Venn diagram with Super Meat Boy and Trials. The remaining 30% of space is consumed by helter-skelter. The trade off for feeling slightly less rewarding is a strange perseverance of super hero immortality, a feat earned not through white knuckle precision and reflex training but a miraculous ability to survive scenarios that, five minutes ago, seemed impossible. Hurling yourself through the air and across scores of deranged trucks should have been a videogame at least twenty years ago. Clustertruck, despite being the first, feels like a game that’s already benefited from years of refinement.
