Chuck’s Challenge 3D [Review By Uzzbuzz]Chuck’s Challenge is a top down tile based puzzle game made by the creator of the classic game, Chip’s Challenge from the late 1980’s. The goal of the game is to make it to the exit in each level, doing so by solving various puzzles, acquiring certain items, and avoiding enemies all at the same time.
Mechanics/Gameplay – The mechanics in Chuck’s Challenge 3D were well implemented and expanded upon. Starting with the first level pack, the player is already exposed to the basics through a few easy to pick up tutorials in which afterwards you get to demonstrate your knowledge of the mechanic in upcoming levels. Each level starts off with you in one spot and the goal in some other spot, and you must gather the necessary collectibles and/or items to be able to get to the exit tile. There are a variety of difficulties of levels, separated into 6 level packs, although they all feel on average the same difficulty, just with a couple really hard levels in each pack. The gameplay was fluid, and with the ability to rewind back your moves as much as you wanted, it allowed for quick adapting to solve puzzles, and to keep trying different methods. There were not really any major bugs that I encountered while playing, as the game has a really solid design base to work off of. Some exploits were found, but those were usually just people making custom levels to show off an exploit that you can only do in that specific custom circumstance, so really, it was irrelevant. There’s a few different types of levels: Sokoban Switch puzzles, which require the player to move boxes around onto certain switches to open gates. There’s also action levels, which focus more on the player getting through a pattern or series of enemies along a path, to get to the exit. Finally there’s more traditional puzzle levels where the player must get keys and objects to be able to move more freely on different terrains. As I mentioned earlier, the progression is rather nice, because no matter which level pack you choose, there will be a couple levels that can be solved rather easily, but then they get harder and each pack has a couple of really hard levels. Really quite a solid foundation and does not add too much to make it overwhelming, but really, it doesn’t add much that the 1989 Chip’s Challenge didn’t have. That makes it keep its charm though, even if the overall difficulty seems a bit toned down. 7.5/10
Fun Factor – Fun? Yes I had fun! I actually enjoyed this game so much that I managed to beat every level without looking up walkthroughs (there were none at the time of my completion). Usually I do not get into puzzle games too much, but seeing as I enjoyed Chip’s Challenge so much as a kid, and had almost forgotten about it, I decided to give it a try. Chip’s Challenge was an amazingly well designed game, and although I found this sequel a bit more toned down in terms of puzzle solving ingenuity, I really still had fun solving some of the harder levels. There was one achievement that affected my fun factor a little bit, and before you say I should not use achievements as a source of fun, that is partially what I’m basing the scoring for this section on, only because I, personally, go for all the achievements and there are many others out there like that. The achievement in question is for beating 99 user created levels. Now this wouldn’t be so bad, if a majority of the user made levels weren’t recreations of normal levels, ‘how to break the game’ levels, or completely unwinnable levels. Also, the way the user created levels section was designed makes the achievement far more annoying than it already sounds. I will cover this in more detail under the achievements section as this is not the main focus of the game, and neither is the achievement. This is a small distraction from the core level sets of the game, and the enjoyment I had while playing those was rather high, although I did get stuck at times, I always went back and managed to eventually figure it out. 7/10
Graphics/Animation – First off, the enemies don’t look menacing at all. The game is kind of adorable in terms of graphics. It uses as much color as it can to paint it as a colorful pretty puzzle game, not like the roots it has with being a complex puzzle game. It just looks so friendly and like it was meant for kids, especially with the character you play as, as well as the cartoonish gleeful representation of the developer used as ‘Mr Tutorial’. The theme of the art is really consistent, and everything just looks so snuggly. You’ll grow to learn that basically everything that moves will kill you, so it sort of makes up for the fact that the enemies do not look all that menacing. Anything that would make you lose does not really appear as if it would. Because of the easy rewind feature though, truly nothing is really that menacing anyways, so it is fitting that the monsters are not terrifying at all. It must have taken some time to get smooth animations for all the types of enemies, as well as the player. Since the camera isn’t completely top down, and is at more of an angled view from above, the characters had to be 3D, hence the 3D in the title compared to the predecessor. It looks good 7.5/10
Music/Sound – The music is alright for a casual puzzle type of game, but it is rather mindless and soporific. I’ll admit, the cheesy title screen music got stuck in my head a little bit, so I’ll give it that, but overall the music was eh, not spectacular. The rewinding also messed up the sounds a bit, which is to be expected, but is still a pain to the ears. Overall the sound effects were really nice and polished and I especially love when getting a certain transformation item and travelling on a new surface, the noises that it makes. The noise when there were enemies moving was just really annoying and drowned out the music. The music, when you can actually hear it without interruption, is alright, but bland as I mentioned before. I just listened to more of the levels total sound composition and was not impressed. The sound effects drown out the music and get annoying in more than just a few levels. On their own, the SFX are great, but how they were executed made a nightmare for ears everywhere. 3/10
Replayability – There is quite a bit of potential for replayability in this game, but as with the sounds, it was done rather poorly. I’ll start off this section with saying what the game did right in terms of creating an enticing experience to get users to replay levels. Beating the levels as fast as possible, which I do not really like with puzzle games, is not too bad in this. This awards the players with medals depending on if they beat the bronze, silver, or gold times. The problem with competing with other players to get the top time, is that not that many people have played past the first world in this game, or even own the game to begin with. As the levels went on, I was easily getting top 10 times in the world on my first completions, while still only getting bronze medals sometimes. The competitive scene for this game just isn’t there really in a big force. There are a few people trying to optimize it, but that’s it. Now the user levels. This could have added a lot of replayability if there were better levels, a better way to search for them, and to filter through them. Not enough of a user base to really make this work as well as it could have. There is also still updates being added to the game, by means of free and paid DLC’s, which add level sets (and achievements darn it). I wouldn’t really consider this replayability though but rather extending the game. 3/10
Level Design – There is a good variety to the levels and puzzles in this game. By the time your brain starts to get worn out and you want a break, the game provides an action level where you have to dodge enemies for the most part and that really breaks up the monotony. The puzzle design is fairly good, and often works with the mechanic of pushing boxes around to help you do things, such as float in water and cover buttons and reroute enemy paths. There are a bunch of deaths that don’t really feel fair, but that is pretty easily remedied by the much talked about rewind feature, which you can do even after death. This means that once you die, you can just rewind until you’re out of range of the enemy and then try to dodge it again. Or, if you screw up a puzzle for sure, but only in a recent step, you can undo it, allowing for fluid quick thinking and trying to calculate when you made certain fatal mistakes. Between the enemy types, there is a good mixture of them. There are enemies that only go back and forth, enemies that run away from you, enemies that run towards you, enemies that turn at walls, and enemies that only move when activated. There were very few times where the level could not be solved eventually given enough time, so for me, the difficulty was always spot on. 7.5/10
Achievements – For the most part, the achievements here cover pretty much all that the game has to offer, excluding speedrunning the puzzles, which would be unnecessary anyways. Firstly there are the basic achievements, for clearing levels in each level pack. For each level pack there is an achievement for clearing all 5 blocks (beating about 20/25 of the levels), and for clearing all 25/25 levels in a pack. These achievements are rather straight forward, and are part of the main gameplay. There are then achievements for creating a custom level and then uploading it, which encourages people to make levels, but unfortunately a vast amount of the uploaded levels are poorly made, mine included. Finally, the rest of the achievements are for completing user made levels. These achievements are not necessary, especially the way they were put in the game. One of the achievements is for beating the weekly level, which is usually a fairly well made level, believe it or not. The problem with this is that I got the achievement for just beating a regular level someone made, so perhaps there’s a bit of a bug there and I may have beaten a level that was the weekly puzzle in the past. Then there are achievements for beating 1,25,50, and 99 user levels. The way the user levels section is set up only creates confusion and annoyance. First off, there is no way to know which levels you’ve done, other than remembering yourself, so if you’re going for this achievement, you’ll probably want to do it in one go, or do 50 and remember what you stopped on, and continue later. The less sessions you do, the better. Another problem with the layout is that there is no good way to search through levels. You are stuck with 5 on screen at a time, only sorted by the newest first it seems, and you have to keep clicking the arrow to slowly go through pages. There is no page jumping, and you must keep clicking until you get to the last level you played. Say for example you’ve done the most recent 50 levels. Every time you exit out of a level or beat it, it takes you back to the first page of levels, rather than the page with the one you just beat. You then have to click the arrow, wait for it to go to the next page, click the arrow again, and repeat, going through 5 levels at a time, until you get back to the level you remembered you played last. Remember, it doesn’t tell you if you’ve beaten it or not, as it’s up to you to keep track. Luckily I went for this achievement first, but it did take a couple hours and it really was not all that enjoyable. The only good thing that came from it, is that a lot of the levels are exact copies of levels in the game, so when I got to those levels in the main game, I already knew how to beat them. I forgot to mention, there’s a featured tab of levels, and a newest tab of levels, although they overlap a bit, so sometimes you’ll do the same level twice and it won’t count 2 times, but sometimes you’ll play a level that looks just like one you’ve beaten, but instead it is an exact clone and will count towards the 99. The featured tab also sorts by newest first, and both featured and newest only seem to show 100 levels at once, meaning at any given time, there are only 150-200 user levels available to play. This is neglecting to mention that many of the levels are either unfairly designed, or impossible to complete, so good luck finding 99 of them that are unique that you can beat. 4.5/10
Pros:+ Cute character design
+ Variety in levels to keep players interested
+ Main game relatively bug free
+ Rewind mistakes for fluid puzzle solving
+ Hats
Cons:- Music/SFX is an earsore sometimes
- Dumbed down from Chip’s Challenge
- User-created levels section is a nightmare
- No replay value
- Hats
Overall Score: 5.7/10
3.0