Duck Adventures Review

[Michael {United Critics}]

🎮Gameplay	6.5	It’s a decent platformer with easy movement.
📷Graphics	6	Looks alright.
🎧Narration/Audio	6	Mid soundtrack.
😮Variety	7.5	Unique mechanics in most levels.
🎰Re-playability	7	You die a lot of times, so yeah.
💲Price	7	Not a bad price, but wait for a sale.

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🎮 Gameplay Mechanics:

🔶 Duck Adventures is a basic indie platformer with very easy controls, yet highly rage-inducing gameplay. If Flappy Bird and Mario had a child, this would probably be the result. The movement in this game is very simple—you jump using the up arrow key, and the rest are for movement. This means that you could even play this game with a single hand if you wanted to. Well, the description’s Mario-like platformer, so it’s pretty easy to guess that the game consists of levels filled with obstacle courses that you must finish to advance.

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🔷 Just three levels in, I understood that this was going to be a long day. There is no sense of a difficulty curve in this game. The first three levels are merely a tutorial, but oh boy, the moment you boot up the fourth level, there will be a launcher waiting to shoot bullets at you. Guess what, even a single hit is enough for a level restart. I have no problem with adding a challenging level like this because I was eventually able to finish it after a lot of tries. However, I would appreciate if they added easier levels in the beginning and slowly built up the difficulty.

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🔶 It was interesting to see how they added new mechanics frequently, which made the experience quite engaging. I was honestly hooked to the game even though it was very rage-inducing, and that’s quite a rare sight. As you advance, you’ll get to see pills that will shrink your Duck, or even the Chrome Dino game itself. It’s a fun platformer, and I don’t think it has major flaws, except for a single one—it gets too challenging too quickly.

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🔷 As of now, I am at level 24 if I recall correctly. It’s essentially a level that plays out exactly like Flappy Bird did; however, it’s very challenging to complete. There are saws in this segment, and often there’s just enough space for your duck to pass through. But then a crow will suddenly appear, giving you no time to react. I mean, I can’t really do anything about this, as it wasn’t even my fault. Sure, I would probably finish the level if I gave it 15 or 20 more tries, but that’s not the experience I am looking for. It got highly challenging by this point, and I just decided to quit the game instead of continuing. However, if you like games that really test your abilities, you would probably want to play on.

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📷 Visuals and Audio:

🔶 Before I begin talking about the visuals, I’d like to point out that there is no option to change key bindings for this game. Sure, it’s just jump and move, but I would have appreciated it if the game let me change the jump key to space since that’s the default key in pretty much every game out there. Secondly, I don’t know why the music was disabled by default when I started playing the game. Additionally, the option for sound effects is broken; if you disable them, they automatically turn on after you’ve died once. So yeah, the game is not polished in its current state.

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🔷 Talking about the visual quality of the game, it’s not really something unique. It has basic cartoonish-themed visuals, but that doesn’t really detract from the overall experience. It’s low effort, but not low quality. The simplicity of the art style complements the straightforward, challenging nature of the gameplay. I'd say the same thing for the soundtrack of the game; it's not particularly memorable but it fits the game's atmosphere well enough.

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📝Main Pros and Cons:

Pros-

• Levels have different mechanics.
  
• Very challenging.
  
• Easy controls.
  
• I liked how the backgrounds and environment was changing.

Cons-

• Still needs some fixes.
  
• Difficulty curve isn’t managed at all.
  
• Could get frustrating at times.
  
• No key bindings.

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😇Honest Rating:

🔶 For the casual gamer, this game could be a little too much. The difficulty ramps up quickly and can be quite frustrating. However, for hardcore platformer fans or people who love challenging games, it’s surely worth giving this game a try.

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Rating: 6/10

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Reviewer: Sha
Duck looks funny when you die