I want to like Clive N Wrench. Trust me, I’ve followed this game almost since whispers of its inception in 2011 and its resultant failed Kickstarter campaign in 2015; it’s a miracle that somehow we still got a finished product after all this time. Yet, despite over a decade consisting of various degrees of development hell, Clive N Wrench is one of the most undercooked 3D platformers that I have ever played in my life. I so desperately want to give this game the love and attention it deserves and recommend it to all my friends remotely interested in the indie collectathon revival… but I can’t.

Where do we even begin? Clive N Wrench suffers from a slew of strange technical and design issues, and to go over all of them in detail would probably take another separate review. So here’s a quick listing of everything that I noticed over my playthrough (and there’s probably more that I’m missing):

- Destructible objects and ragdolled “defeated” enemies behave at a different frame rate than the in-game frame rate, so they will fly wildly upon hit and their models can often spaz out and distort/elongate into Longachu-esque forms while clipping into surfaces.
- Projectiles sometimes fail to unspawn after a certain amount of time, and running into them will still damage you.
- Collecting an ancient stone (the equivalent of Power Stars/Shines) puts you in an unskippable collecting animation cutscene, but you can still take damage and die while in this state.
- Poor AI for enemies means that they don’t know how to path upon spotting you besides running in a straight line, so enemies get stuck on walls and corners all the time.
- Some objects just straight up lack geometry and solidity.
- The climbing animation when climbing poles runs at a different frame rate than in-game. So, the climbing animation appears to lag while going up/down and the result is this, where the model appears to vibrate into the pole. This is recorded at 60 FPS by the way while the game runs at 144 FPS: on my 144 Hz monitor, this effect is exacerbated and Clive turned into this black blurry blob of a rough outline and it actually gave me minor motion sickness focusing on the climbing.
- Some random pushable/contactable objects in the overworld that serve no purpose other than being mobile (such as the tennis balls in the first world) do not properly respond to collision and behave erratically.
- Most sloped vertical surfaces don’t actually cause any slippage via friction or present any barriers to movement, so you can walk up and stand on just about anything. No, that's not an exaggeration.
- Sometimes these sloped surfaces have obvious invisible protrusions, so you can stand in mid-air.
- There was an enemy completely submerged under death water that was shooting me with arrows whom I could not touch, despite the fact that all other enemies died upon contact with the death water.
- When adjusting the camera near walls, it will pop out of the environment, so you can see the infinite expanse outside of the level walls.
- You can’t adjust the camera upwards without the camera getting uncomfortably close to your character.
- There’s no way to adjust camera sensitivity, and it’s really, really slow.
- For that matter, there’s no way to adjust most of the settings (no FOV slider, no brightness slider, no frame rate limiter, etc), much less tinker with exact graphical specifications on PC.
- You also can’t adjust text scroll speed, and the built-in speed is super slow. But you also can’t just press X to skip to the end of the dialogue, because that closes out of the dialogue box!
- The right trigger handles camera reset while RB is used to crouch/ground-pound/dive, which feels backwards to me given that the latter is used way more often. Similarly, LB is held down a lot to run while the left trigger does… nothing. Sure would be nice to rebind this, but you can’t rebind controls whatsoever!
- Some characters will have a context sensitive “Y” prompt above their heads when you can’t actually talk to them (so Y does nothing).
- Every time Clive runs over the edge of a platform, he will short hop. Not full jump or fall down from gravity, but rather short hop. This interfered with my habit of timing my full jump right before running off the edge, and caused my double jump input to be eaten early so many times, resulting in tons of dumb deaths.
- You can’t skip the intro cutscene of Clive jumping out the time machine and the resulting cutscene camera pan over the level introduction, no matter if you’ve completed the level or not. Expect to see this a lot.
- The landing animation doesn’t always activate immediately on surfaces, so Clive will sometimes “glide” for several seconds before finally stagnating and landing.
- There’s a certain boss run level that forces you into a narrow linear corridor and locks your camera while platforming multiple times; adjusting the camera left or right during any of these segments will cause the camera to do a complete 180 (while you’re in mid-air or on a collapsible platform by the way). Also, you can’t perceive depth very well because it’s a straight-on horizontal camera angle and you can’t tilt the camera up or down during these sections. Fun!
- The 2nd boss of the game shakes the table that the boss fight takes place upon a ton, and is extremely nauseating.
- The game’s physics while on rapidly rotating circular platforms are very messed up; Clive will correctly slow to a crawl while walking in the direction against rotation, but then also slow to a crawl while walking in the direction of rotation instead of accelerating and similarly feel restrained while walking towards/away from the center of rotation. Basically, you have to jump like a hot potato to meaningfully move on any rotating platform.
- The game is optimized extremely poorly; at high settings, it was still dipping below 60 FPS in random environments (not necessarily because of heavy object spawn or large loading distances) and because game logic is actually tied to in-game frame rate, this often meant collision and ragdoll physics felt extremely inconsistent between 144 and >60 FPS. For context, I'm playing this on PC with a GTX 3070.

Beyond all this lack of polish however, lies one fundamental issue; the game is just too easy. Clive can gain considerable height with a quick backflip/sideflip (quickly change directions with the left joystick and then jump) and then double jump into infinite glide/hover with Wrench. This maneuver can basically be used for 75% of the jumps in the game, and the other 25% can be cleared with simple dash into double jump. For context, it would be like if you were playing Super Mario Sunshine and 75% of the jumps were just spin jump/sideflip into the hover nozzle with infinite water. There’s no satisfying “efficient” speed tech in the game, because there’s no “low-and-long movement” option like a long jump or the dive from A Hat in Time. There’s not much challenge to necessitate this movement either; one egregious example is in the pirate level, where two ancient stones are located within visible sight of one another, both upon tall stone watchtowers that can be platformed between within one minute. The vast majority of challenges are just some degree of repeating the same jumps within this mostly open world of scattered collectibles, many of which are presented as the exact same type of objective. As a result, platforming begins to feel pretty rote once you’re an hour or more into the game… which rather defeats the purpose of a collectathon 3D platformer wouldn’t you say?

What really serves to hammer the nail in the coffin though, is that Clive N Wrench lacks charm. I cannot recall any of the songs on the soundtrack; most sounded quite a bit like generic Creative Commons elevator music (I would make the comparison to Kevin MacLeod’s work, but that would be rude to Kevin MacLeod) in short loops of a couple of minutes or less. NPCs don’t really offer any interesting dialogue or have any body to their personality beyond generic questing descriptions and some quick one-liners. Similarly, Clive N Wrench themselves don’t really have any notable personality quirks (you’ll be very disappointed if you’re trying to make comparisons to the banter of Banjo and Kazooie) and have basically no input upon their roles in the narrative. Speaking of narrative, the intro cutscene has no dialogue and is vaguely pantomimed out while the rest of the story is told here and there with sparse dialogue boxes; you’ll probably understand the story more from the Steam Store description alone. The time travel theming just feels rather weak; besides the lack of atmosphere from distinct level elements and tunes, they’re all over the place with the level inspirations (how the hell does a Toy Story 2 Andy’s House rip-off level fit into meddling with time travel?) Finally, the game is unfortunately rather hideous and the characters look like discount Five Nights At Freddy’s animatronics... but there’s no horror to be found except from how bland everything looks!

I’ll give one concession to the developers here: I really appreciate the utility of the in-game stopwatch detector to help you hunt down those last collectibles, and they also made sure to plant destructible vases containing stopwatches next to important switches and objectives so you’ll be able to easily track down remnants without excessively struggling for that completion. Unfortunately, this game aged like milk within the 11 hours that it took me to snag everything, and I honestly can’t see myself going back any time soon given the lack of both personality and gameplay depth. I do hope that the developers listen to the early reviews and fix up all the technical issues, because it would be a shame if this was how the story ended after all this time… but good god, I still can’t get over that art style. I swear it’s not that complicated to make 3D platformers look crisp guys, we figured this out all the way back in 2000!