An interesting mascot platformer with puzzles after each level. The clay animal characters are very cute. The level design is strange and seems to have things scattered everywhere. It's the kind of design that makes me feel like I'm just looking at levels in a video game and not a cohesive world. I found the movement to be pretty fun, except in the underwater segments. The puzzles are a nice break from the platforming, but they become frustrating towards the end of the game. The music can be overly energetic and annoying at times.

Playing Through My Evercade Collection Part 7: Interplay Vol 2

While its certainly a mile ahead of the Clayfighter series it span off from, Claymates isn't really all that interesting either. Sure the gimmick of swapping characters for specific roles is neat but the levels are mostly long and kind of dull, the music just loops over and over in a really irritating fashion and the whole thing just isn't very memorable.

Its not horrible, the gameplay is solid enough and theres enough gimmicks to keep things moving like the overland menu having little pushing puzzles, the bouncing grid bonus game etc... but honestly its the sort of thing you would have rented way back if the actual games you wanted was out and unavailable.

Pros: Whimsical claymation visuals with a fun and quirky art direction. I quite love, yes, love, the main playable characters in this, which are just a series of different animals with different abilities to match. A rat that can run very (and I mean very) fast as well as bark (yeah...), a cat that can climb trees and scratch up foes, a duck-like bird that can flap its little wings to hover and peck its beak, a fish that can swim as well as walk on land for a limited time, and a woodchuck that can whip acorns across the stage as well as dig through special areas. Take a hit, and you turn back into the base character Clayton, a boy who was transformed by an evil Shaman into a blue blob of clay... And all he can do is roll around and do a dinky little punch. Look, the story isn't important, just know that it's a decent adventure, 2D sidescrolling platformer. One really neat part about this game, is the worldmap! It's actually a really involved and engaging worldmap that has you doing little puzzles where you need to guide robots around by moving obstacles and clearing their paths, ultimately to create access points to the next platforming stage. And there's even fun little bonus rooms, particularly a bouncing ball minigame with cool mode7 effects. There's a lot to enjoy here.

Cons: The level design is a mess, and the physics are a bit slippery to boot. This makes the gameplay kinda rough, to be honest. Hit detection is also a bit rubbish, and projectiles fly just about everywhere with no warning, and some enemies and obstacles move incredibly fast, and getting hit feels a bit too inevitable... If I take issue with Sonic levels, I definitely have to take issue here too. It's even messier.

What it means to me: But, this game does mean a lot to me. It was another game my brother and I rented quite often at my grandmother's house, and it has such a fancy free good time vibe to it. The clay look, it's so innocent, so childlike, can't help but get nostalgic from it. And I'm someone who just loves animals, and animals that act like animals, like these characters do, it's why I loved all the Animal Buddies in the Donkey Kong Country games too. And it immediately drew me in to this game. Can't ignore its problems, but it has a charm to it, that I can't help but appreciate the game for what it does right.

I only played this for about 15 minutes, because that's all it really deserved. Doesn't control well at all and just isn't that fun to play. The concept is also just way too overly simplistic, your default form is a literal ball that punches things with a single fist in one frame. It looks incredibly cheap.

It's pretty wild that Nintendo just puts these mediocre games up on their Switch SNES app that I somehow have never heard of despite my knowledge of retro games. It's actually quite impressive.