Clustertruck Preview

Have you ever been sitting there, minding your own business, and had the intrinsic desire to destroy the blessed calm that once filled your very being and, in its place, insert rage, anger, and a modicum of self-worth? Clustertruck may be exactly what you’re looking for.

The premise is simple; jump from truck to truck and reach the end of the level. The challenge arises when the trucks start to move and beautiful scenic routes are replaced with laser beams, swinging hammers, and the edge of an ice cliff. You have to throw yourself from the relative safety of one truck into the brisk morning air of uncertainty and hope your lucky stars that the gods of fate have smiled kindly upon you as you descend into, for lack of a better term, a cluster of trucks, hoping you find your feet landing on a solid surface. If you touch the ground, you lose. If you touch a laser, you lose. If you try to summon Beelzebub through sacramental sacrifice to aid you in your sacred quest to reach the finish line, you’ll lose - you, nor anybody else, has time for that before falling off a truck.

You are given a slight aid in the form of the ability to slow time for a very short period, however; in my experience this ability was relatively useless and went unused for most of my gameplay. The only real assistance it gave was that I could briefly slow my pace to a snail’s crawl and give one last thought to my virtual wife and kids before being smooshed under the wheel of a two-tonne truck.

At its heart, Clustertruck is a platformer, but instead of the traditional 2D or 2.5D, it throws you into a 3D fray with explosions and lasers (you know what they say; every time a truck explodes, Michael Bay gets his wings). The added dimension of movement does mix things up a bit, but the real selling point of the game for me was how easy it is to retry. Much like Super Meat Boy or it's ilk, there’s no faffing around with menus or load times. It’s a simple “You lose, you suck, you should feel bad about yourself. Care to retry and salvage part of your self respect?”. It’s because of this simplicity that I continued to play the game for a number of hours, way after my colleagues had stop caring about my progress. I wasn’t trying to get to the next level for them. I wasn’t even trying to get to the next level for myself. I was trying to get to the next level to give a big “fuck you” to the game, and show it that I could.

While Clustertruck is still in it’s early alpha stages, it’s looking promising to be quite the time sink on many a gamer’s computer.