As someone that's never dabbled in any MMO for more than an hour at most, Corporate Clash's vice grip on me for the past month has been an interesting experience for me.
Deciding to give it a chance since some of my friends play it, I wasn't expecting a game with such a simple set of rules and mechanics to hook me as much as it has. Perhaps it's the simplistic desire for a game to pass the time with, but the combat mechanics are simplistic enough to understand easily and nuanced enough to require coordination to get through tougher encounters unscathed. Combat never feels too tedious to get through, and all the animations associated with the various gags are great. The bosses that have been recently added with the update I started on are great tests of your game knowledge too. They feel appropriate and are genuine tests of cooperation and synergy between players.
As far as downsides go, the game feels somewhat scattered. Obviously polished in several areas, and clearly unpolished in others. Not every street has a pond to fish in, some of the new streets are great to navigate in, but it highlights how tedious a lot of the old streets are. A couple of the new streets added are also undeniably bad and feel like a first attempt in a level editor rather than something that should've been added to the game. Some tasklines are pure tedious filler. While combat doesn't feel too repetitive, being given tasks that force you to go back and forth a long winding road to get to a shopkeeper absolutely IS repetitive. The game also does a poor job of preparing you to do facilities. They're not particularly difficult, but the game doesn't guide you towards doing them before the final taskline of a playground, in which you have to do all 10 in a row if you neglected to grind these out earlier while doing other tasks.
The lack of an NPC telling you it's a good idea to go and do these feels like a misstep when the playgrounds before daffodil gardens didn't have any such area to help grind tasklines in. It's not a natural conclusion to come to.
This is more of a ramble than a review at this point, but to cut a long story short: I think Toontown: Corporate Clash is worth your time. It's completely free, has no microtransactions, has no subscription, nothing to goad you into spending real money on it. And that, alongside its aesthetic, is a big pull in its favour. If that was the only things it had going for it, I would just point you towards the hundreds of free flash games out there in the world. But it's not. It has large amounts of content and work put into it, and its retooling of mechanics and functions make it an enjoyable and engaging MMO to tinker away at.
Deciding to give it a chance since some of my friends play it, I wasn't expecting a game with such a simple set of rules and mechanics to hook me as much as it has. Perhaps it's the simplistic desire for a game to pass the time with, but the combat mechanics are simplistic enough to understand easily and nuanced enough to require coordination to get through tougher encounters unscathed. Combat never feels too tedious to get through, and all the animations associated with the various gags are great. The bosses that have been recently added with the update I started on are great tests of your game knowledge too. They feel appropriate and are genuine tests of cooperation and synergy between players.
As far as downsides go, the game feels somewhat scattered. Obviously polished in several areas, and clearly unpolished in others. Not every street has a pond to fish in, some of the new streets are great to navigate in, but it highlights how tedious a lot of the old streets are. A couple of the new streets added are also undeniably bad and feel like a first attempt in a level editor rather than something that should've been added to the game. Some tasklines are pure tedious filler. While combat doesn't feel too repetitive, being given tasks that force you to go back and forth a long winding road to get to a shopkeeper absolutely IS repetitive. The game also does a poor job of preparing you to do facilities. They're not particularly difficult, but the game doesn't guide you towards doing them before the final taskline of a playground, in which you have to do all 10 in a row if you neglected to grind these out earlier while doing other tasks.
The lack of an NPC telling you it's a good idea to go and do these feels like a misstep when the playgrounds before daffodil gardens didn't have any such area to help grind tasklines in. It's not a natural conclusion to come to.
This is more of a ramble than a review at this point, but to cut a long story short: I think Toontown: Corporate Clash is worth your time. It's completely free, has no microtransactions, has no subscription, nothing to goad you into spending real money on it. And that, alongside its aesthetic, is a big pull in its favour. If that was the only things it had going for it, I would just point you towards the hundreds of free flash games out there in the world. But it's not. It has large amounts of content and work put into it, and its retooling of mechanics and functions make it an enjoyable and engaging MMO to tinker away at.