It’s getting to a point now where I’m genuinely tempted to screenshot the opening paragraph of a past review to save myself typing out for the thousandth time that I really, really like puzzle platformers. Okay, “thousandth” may be a slight ex-egg-uration.
Hey, I’ve got to get my kicks out of these reviews somehow.
From the start, I kinda of knew what I was in for with Gravity Duck as it’s from Woblyware, the same minds behind League of Evil, and appears to be in the same engine as well. Now League of Evil was a reasonably fun platformer with stiff controls, fast levels, and a solid difficulty curve. Turns out Gravity Duck is a reasonably fun puzzle platformer with tight controls, fast levels, and a solid difficulty curve. Let’s get into why.
Gravity Duck‘s controls are simple and intuitive. The left-stick (or d-pad if you’re so inclined) moves your little duck about, while the ‘X’ button flips gravity. You know, like in all platformers. I don’t know why the duck even bothers having wings if it can fall vertically upwards at the drop of a hat. Regardless, the controls felt tight and responsive, and that’s incredibly important in any platformer. When I died, I never blamed it on the controls.
The camera on the other hand. I blamed quite a lot of deaths on the camera. Most of them in fact. Gravity Duck‘s level design philosophy seems to be “have a short gauntlet of obstacles with a few gravity twists and turns here or there, and death spikes plonked about.” This is fine, it makes levels satisfying and quick to complete. However, despite the small scope of the levels, the camera is usually zoomed in to a point where you can’t see the floor you’re about to fall towards. And leaps of faith onto death spikes aren’t fun. Especially when this usually happens in the latter half of the levels forcing you to start from scratch. It feels cheep (ba-dum tssh).
On the other hand, the slightly zoomed in camera does help a massive amount with readability, since your player duck and enemies are usually quite small compared to the long stretches of spikes or flat ground. It’s great too that the artwork makes it extremely clear what can and can’t be stepped on. Platforms and enemies are solid and simple, while background elements are elaborately shaped or see-through.
But again, Gravity Duck drops the ball as the puzzles aren’t engaging. I’m not sure you can even really call it a puzzler if I’m honest, since the solution is always obvious. Since the levels are so incredibly linear, there’s always only one way to go, and only one thing to try out to complete the level. It’s either to flip gravity to go over the thing in your way, or flip gravity to hit a gravity well and rotate gravity sideways. The only variation on this might be having to wait a bit for a timed enemy, and then flipping. It’s super simple stuff.
The most memorable “puzzle” I can think of is in the last world, where you encounter teleporters that move you somewhere else and flip gravity at the same time, requiring quick reactions and good timing. This was memorable to me as the teleporters were invisible, making finding the way forward a bit more experimental than in most levels. I’m not sure if this was intentional or down to a glitch, but either way, I found the invisible gateways to be a great change of pace when compared to the restrictive and bottle-necked levels that came before them.
Now before I wrap-up, here’s a list of all the things about Gravity Duck that are incredibly generic.
-4 worlds in typical platformers themes (forest, cave, mountain, city)
-Chirpy (heh) soundtrack with little to no memorable tunes. Perfectly adequate
-Skeletons, bats, dogs. Enemies are pretty standard. Standout one for me is probably the giant caterpillar
-Mediocre boss fights, in that there aren’t any
-Sound effect when you flip gravity, but not when you land… It’s weird, now that I think about it, most things in the game are entirely silent, except for gravity shifts which should be silent. Is the game making a commentary on the fact that we as a society take gravity for granted, when in fact it’s one of, if not the most important aspect of our daily lives? Nah, I think they just didn’t bother with a lot of sound effects
To conclude, Gravity Duck is another short but solid release in Ratalaika’s easy-plat roster (as I’ve coined it). It takes just over an hour to complete in its entirety, and if I’m honest, I was losing interest by the third world, but pushed on because I couldn’t rightfully review an hour-long game if I only played half of it.
But having played all of it, it’s just very OK. Incredibly average. Outstandingly mediocre. It gave me glimpses of really clever ideas, but never really took a leap of faith and tried anything that set it above every other puzzle-platformer game on the market. If you’ve bled the well dry and desperately need a new puzzle-platformer to play, Gravity Duck will satisfy you for an hour if you’re lucky. Otherwise, it’s up to you if you’re willing to pay for just another mediocre puzzle-platformer.
A digital copy of Gravity Duck for PS4 was provided by the developer.
Find Gravity Duck on PS4 here: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP0891-CUSA15317_00-RATGAGRAVITYDUCK
