The Last Tinker: City of Colors Preview
In a world created by paper, glue and clay you take control of Koru, a monkey-man made of different colours of clay, and it is your job to assume the role of Tinker and stop the evil spreading across Tinkerworld! Sadly not in the preview code though, with an hour’s worth of the title to play around in. That’s not to say it wasn’t a good experience, as there was never a dull moment. Even starting the game gave some humour, as the difficulty modes include Kid’s Mode and Instant Death before getting into the platforming fun.
Firstly, the graphics, they are, in a word, superb. Mimimi Productions have made excellent use of the Unity engine, even in this early code. They haven’t gone for anything near realism; the world is made of paper. The character models are lovely and Koru himself looks sculpted from clay by Aardman Animation. With an overbite, he wouldn’t look too out of place beside Wallace & Gromit.
Controlling Koru and his floating buddy Tap, who sometimes lives in his pocket, is very easy and the controls are responsive. Though the lack of a definite jump button in a platformer is noticeable, it is compensated for with auto-jumping or staying away from the edge, depending on whether you are holding spacebar. It was only a little awkward to use, but worked well as most of the jumping was along a series of points, meaning you didn’t need to keep hitting space, just holding it.
We can presume the game will get less hand-holdy as it progresses, but every cardboard speech bubble that popped up to remind me of something was never intrusive. There is no map, but if you get lost you can send Tap out to show you the way, leaving a trail of confetti behind him as he zooms into the distance, which is a useful feature.
The fighting this early in the game was a little boring, given that you either keep hitting the left or right mouse, but hopefully this will get more interesting later in the game with the promise of unlockable colour-based powers. The end credits mention tigers but I didn’t come across any, so here’s hoping for lots of different enemy types as these ones weren’t very interesting.
The music is very slow and melodic while you’re exploring, suiting the laid-back mood of this part of Colortown. It picks up during the race, lending to the sense of urgency as your rival cheats his way ahead of you. In all, I was very happy with how the game sounded, though the narrator at the start was the only speaking role. I would like it if the Sims-style gibberish was replaced by spoken dialogue, but it wouldn’t be horrid if it remained.
A very beautiful game that I am looking forward to playing in full.
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