The Last Tinker: City of Colors Review

A colorful world filled with subpar gameplay and mediocraty.

The Last Tinker: City of Color is a platformer with some light action elements. It features a bright and vibrant world that looks like it was made from cardboard and that’s all there is to say about it that isn’t negative.

The combat is repetitive, and doesn’t do anything to inspire the player to invest in buying new moves for their character. You can simply click the left mouse button until everything is dead. Every once in a while you run up against enemies with shields but all you have to do is hold the left mouse button to break through them. The enemies aren’t memorable or imaginative either, there’s the ones that shoot at you, the guys that melee you and the big guys that take a lot of hits to kill.

The platforming isn’t particularly fun either.

You just hold down spacebar and the game takes care of the rest for you. There are speed rails to grind on that help you traverse the levels and they are littered with traps for you to avoid. Hitting signs causes a small amount of damage and aren’t really a problem, but other obstacles such as bushes will kill you instantly, forcing you to go all the way back to the beginning of the rail to start again. I don’t believe I have sworn so heavily at bushes in my entire life.

Sections of the game require you to use a mushroom friend to clear debris and open gates. You can throw balls of color at him to make him perform different actions, red for example, causes him to give off an explosion if he’s in his tiny form. There was a particular moment where he was hidden behind a wall with a small crack in it, the game clearly wants you to throw a ball at him to destroy the wall and set him free. Ok no problem, except the game’s auto targeting causes you to select a section of the mushroom that can’t be hit no matter where you stand in relation to the crack. I spent the better part of thirty minutes trying to get my ball to hit him to no avail. 

I spent the better part of thirty minutes trying to get my ball to hit him to no avail.

There is a story of some sort in the game but it’s difficult to follow because there’s no voice acting, instead the characters grunt and make noises. This isn’t such a big deal at first, but when you’re playing the game for hours at a time it becomes impossible to overlook. That’s not to say games with no voice acting are terrible, Mario and Zelda are fine examples of how to do this style right, but characters in The Last Tinker make incredibly annoying, high pitched and repetitive grunts constantly.

After 2 or 3 hours of making my ears suffer I finally started playing it on mute.

The Last Tinker: City of Color is a game that should only be played in 15 minute bursts, any more time spent on it than that and it instantly becomes clear that this game is not worth your time or attention.  Save your money for something that deserves to be played.