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The Last Tinker: City of Colors Review
A lo-fi success on PC earlier this summer, The Last Tinker: City of Colors is every inch the moderate success (as a game) that you'd expect from its reasonably warm critical reception. It's perfect fodder for the PS4 right now, as Sony's new console is, at the moment, ever-so-slightly lacking in titles that appeal directly to much younger players . If you're an adult and pick this up by accident, the game's target market is evident from the very first second, as bright crayon animations and a none-more-enthusastic narrator instantly give the game away.
The difficulty tiers are also as accommodating as possible, with the standard Normal and Hard modes coexisting with an impossibly mild "Kids" mode. This is a third-person action game - a sort of Zelda for beginners - that is set in a garishly bright and colourful world made out of what appears to be a cross between fabric and crayon drawings.
The world has clearly been inspired by those found in Nintendo's 3D Zelda adventures (most notably The Wind Waker) primarily because of its lack of dialogue (it's all text) and the scarcity of a jump button. Shopkeepers also bicker with you about stolen fruit, and a small band of punk kids harass you with mild insults everywhere you go. If you suspect that this shady bunch will get their comeuppance at some point during the story, you may very well be right. This is Hyrule, after all. Only it isn't, obviously.
This is an extremely simple and frill-free videogame. Aside from a few (extremely straightforward) projectile attacks that arrive a bit later on, this is all about moving around a 3D space and hammering a single attack button. There are a few combat modifiers available but they're largely inessential, and everything else - from running to jumping to sliding on vines to transitioning between pieces of scenery - is done by holding down the right trigger; a control scheme which may have been inspired by the more recent Assassin's Creed adventures.
This is also a pretty heavy-handed fable about racism, in which stern schoolteachers harp on at you about how segregation is wrong, about how all colours must come together in unity and how all colours are equal. This would be a tad nauseating in a game aimed at adults, but the fact that it's aimed at kids - and is so damn good natured, through to its very core - results in it being very, very hard to dislike. It's a bonus in that video games rarely take a stance on anything at all, so this does feel like progress; pigeon-step progress perhaps, but progress nonetheless.
The PS4 port is less impressive, with an extremely poor frame rate (which admittedly improves as the game goes on) and a crude animation style which is bereft of detail… but visually, its rough edges only make it all the more charming. Needless to say, the target audience of younger kids aren't likely to care at all about the game's minor technical issues. The Last Tinker: City of Colors gets weirder and more visually inventive the longer it goes on, although there are a couple of mystifyingly poor sequences; like a drab insta-fail foot chase and one of the weakest stealth set pieces in gaming history; again inspired directly by Zelda.
But as already mentioned, this is a very hard game to dislike. It's way too simplistic to engage with most adults, but as a very tame and very forgiving introduction to the visual language and systems of 3D platforming adventures, this is far better than expected. If you've got curious children, this is a pretty ideal way to ease them into what is now a staple videogame genre.
6/10
Review By Chet Roivas
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