Cloudberry Kingdom

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

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Review:

Cloudberry Kingdom is a Platformer released in 2013 on PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii U. In this game, players take the role of a bald, gruff hero clad in green as he jumps his way through various stages full of traps and other obstacles.

The presentation in this game is… strange. The visuals in this game are so poorly-constructed and amateurish as to look ugly, yet this was clearly by design – the game uses subtle cel-shaded 3D visuals in places where simple 2D would suffice, and in the intro the villain even mocks the hero’s lack of a neck, so I suppose this is a stylistic choice? Well, it’s ugly either way, I suppose.

On the other hand though, this game’s soundtrack absolutely rocks, with some excellent techno-style tunes like Nero’s Law and Get a Grip. However, while great, the soundtrack doesn’t quite seem to fit this game’s visuals. Like I said, strange.

The gameplay here takes the form of a challenging obstacle course-style Platformer where players aim to try to reach the end of each of the game’s stages intact, and preferably while collecting ten gems within the stage. As players progress, they are gradually introduced to new gameplay elements, keeping things from getting stale too quickly.

Here’s what makes this game a bit different, though – all of the levels in the game are procedurally generated, adapting not only to the abilities you currently have, but also to your own individual skill level. So your progress through the game may be quite different from another player’s, and there are theoretically a near-infinite number of levels potentially within this game.

Unfortunately, Cloudberry Kingdom also suffers from some of the major problems of procedurally-generated game design – placement of pickups, enemies, and obstacles within the game’s levels often seems nonsensical and, well, random, and there are odd difficulty spikes and valleys all over the place. If a human created this, it would be just poor level design, but since an algorithm designed these levels… you know what, no, that’s also poor level design.

This might be somewhat better if the core gameplay here was good, but Cloudberry Kingdom’s gameplay is merely passable, working well enough to be enjoyable, but not truly great enough to make up for faults elsewhere in the game. At the very least I’ll say that the game is excellent when it comes to letting players restart immediately upon dying, making for a good “just one more try” sort of gameplay.

Don’t take this to mean that I think Cloudberry Kingdom is a bad game. At times, this can be quite a fun and challenging Platformer. But it’s a bizarre amalgamation of some really good and really bad elements all smashed into one another, and ultimately I think that much like the procedurally-generated level design, I think that your mileage may vary with this one.

tl;dr – Cloudberry Kingdom is a challenging Platformer with procedurally-generated level design. This makes for some frequently poor level design, and that’s on top of core gameplay that’s merely “okay”, but there are some elements here that are easier to like, like the game’s fast pace and great soundtrack. Ultimately, as this game will provide different players with different experiences, I think that how good this game is will vary somewhat from person to person.

Grade: C

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