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| | Publisher: Gogii Games  Genre: Puzzle & Trivia | | | Min OS X: 10.3 Hard Disk: 100 MB Graphics: 800x600 @ 16-bit |
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Isn’t it a pain to have to decide? The endless choices can be both a blessing and a curse to the end user. In a market filled with so many search-and-find games it can be a confusing place. Thankfully, we have reviews like this to help us!A reviewer's purpose is to guide you, the reader, to the right product. The Clumsys hits the mark in most areas, proving to be a worthy place to put your cash. The Clumsys puts you in the shoes of a housewife with a problem: Grandpa Albert (who happens to be an inventor) has accidentally sent your kids throughout the reaches of time and space, scattering their belongings and more into places they really shouldn’t be. So what exactly makes this game any different from the rest? Gameplay In case you aren’t familiar with the gameplay of this genre, it requires you to find as many “wrong” items in a scene as possible, such as a toy car in an Egyptian setting, which obviously doesn’t fit!Based around a time travel concept, The Clumsys transports you throughout many famous and different environments to find the missing kids. Unfortunately, they took a few things with them which you are required to find. Every level is divided into several stages, each with a different objective - based on how far you are into the game. Instead of just sticking to the “find such and such” branch, it grows out into different types of gameplay, such as fixing things broken by the rascals or placing them just as they were before, in order to correct the time zone setting. This is a nice feature, but of course, you are going to play the same scene over and over and, yes, over again. Thankfully, Albert made a few very useful devices for finding people before the incident (lucky, huh?). Finding the parts of these gizmos is a secondary objective and required to progress as they will be called on later to find each child. Again, this is a nice way to have expanded on the genre. All-in-all the gameplay is very solid and rewarding. Presentation What can you say to flatter a two-dimensional game besides comment on the rather nicely illustrated backgrounds for the scenes? I suppose a great deal of work goes into each one and Banzai Interactive deserves merit for that alone. My only problem was the blocky resolution which made it very hard to spot some items on screen. If you are going to paint and draw such nice backdrops, why show them in such poor quality?Music doesn’t really exist in-game. Every now and then a little ditty will wail over the speakers, but nothing more - bar the story animation backing track. As well as this, Albert’s voice acting is a little cheesy and has a hideous level of quality. What I liked the most was the sound effects, each set tailored for the appropriate scene: a gentle sea breeze for the trojan horse outside troy or the coms chatter on board Apollo 11. Sound is not average, but not that great either. Value Over 100 scenes are available to the player, an astonishing amount that only the dedicated would bother to complete (excluding me!). I can honestly say it has a great amount of bang-per-buck indeed. If you are in for the genre and have 20 dollars to get rid of, I seriously recommend you give it a try.Conclusion It really manages to break the mould in such an overused genre and is certainly a good representative for the casual gaming world. I can’t really go on too long about it, The Clumsys being a simple game and all, but it really is great value for money and serves way past the 20 dollar mark.Pros • Great value
• Different game modes
• Nice sound effectsCons • Poor voice acting quality
• Hardly any music
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