Clonk Rage - Review

Clonk is a German indie game (available in English, of course) which is possibly a lot less known worldwide than it should be. I'm really not exaggerating if I say it is one of the very best games I know - and I'm not only talking about indie games. Clonk is quite a long-running series, with the first game released in 1994. Nine titles onwards there is "Clonk Rage", the latest game which was in released in 2008.

For those who have not heard of it yet I'll try to summarize the game a bit. Basically, Clonk is an extensive 2D action-adventure-strategy platformer. Usually you control a group of little characters called Clonks, using them to build up a settlement. For building you need resources, which you can mostly get by digging into the ground. You can dig for coal, pump up oil, or blow up veins of ore and gold. While gold is the common currency in the game used for buying stuff, some of the "raw" natural resources like wood and stone are used directly for building. But you also need energy to operate your factories and other equipment. For instance, coal is used to fire up a furnace which in turn melts ore into metal. Or more commonly, it takes a windmill to get the elevator running, which of course you build for mining a lot more efficiently.

That at least is the most common scenario. Actually, this is just a tiny fraction of what Clonk offers in terms of variety, but summing it all up is practically impossible. Other popular scenarios are the middle age where huge castles are built and knights fight hand to hand or on horseback, the wild west where small towns are built and cowboys duel each other, and several flavors of foreign worlds, like the arctic, deep sea, jungle, you name it.

And why is it impossible to mention all that? Because there's an innumerable quantity of more stuff thanks to Clonk's modability. For at least 10 years now there has been a huge community of people who create all sorts of addons to the game. This can range from mere maps for the content that's already there, to scripted adventures (for example, there is a neat Diablo-esque level including questing and leveling up), to completely new scenarios like a cool sci-fi pack consisting of armored troops with machine guns, hoverbikes and huge complexes full of alien scum). I hope this makes it at least remotely understandable why it's so hard just to define Clonk.

Technically, the game has come quite far. While it featured cute but crude hand-drawn 2D pixel art in the past, the game now features a 3D look that isn't any less charming. Probably most interesting, though, are the changeability of the terrain, which reminds one of Cortex Command, and the "fluid" physics. Especially the water in the game is pretty dynamic - making rain a lethal foe as it loves to flood your mine shafts.

And to briefly cover one of Clonk's most important aspects: it is multiplayer. All kinds of it. You can play in splitscreen mode with up to 4 players on one PC, using a single keyboard, or you can plug in as many gamepads as you'd like. But you can also play over the internet, which works mighty fine without especially much lag. And how you play is entirely up to you: you may want to play a small "melee", which is a kind of deathmatch, or you may build up huge fortresses with walls and other defenses to have really big battles. Or you can just play a level cooperatively, to build up a huge colony with a friend; or with 12, if you like.

And let me get this right: Clonk is not an especially complex game that takes years to get into or anything. Over the years it has become very accessible, offering modernized control schemes. It's just very different from what you might know and simply offers a whole lot.

Originally posted at TIGSource. Modified and redistributed with the author's permission.

Links

Website: http://www.clonk.de

Product page and download: http://www.clonk.de/cr.php

Direct demo download (Windows): http://www.clonkx.de/rage/cr_full_win32.exe

Direct demo download (Linux): http://www.clonkx.de/rage/cr_full_linux.tar.bz2


Direct demo download (Mac): http://www.clonkx.de/rage/cr_full_mac.zip

Screenshot 1: http://www.clonk.de/press/cr_ashlands.jpg

Screenshot 2: http://www.clonk.de/press/cr_sharklake.jpg

Screenshot 3: http://www.clonk.de/press/cr_knights.jpg

Full screenshot package: http://www.clonk.de/press/cr_screenshots.zip

Box shot / badge: http://www.clonk.de/press/badge_cr_400.jpg


Trailer video (streaming): http://www.clonk.de/video.php?id=cr

Trailer video (download): http://www.clonkx.de/rage/cr_trailer_divx.avi