Gravity.Duck Review

Gravity.Duck is a puzzle platformer from Ravenous Games, the creative minds behind Random Heroes and the League of Evil games. Much like these other creations, Gravity.Duck is a fairly straightforward, old school platformer with a retro-inspired look and feel. In this game, however, gravity is the main hook driving all of the gameplay.

In Gravity.Duck players control a duck that has been granted the power to control gravity. With this ability, the object of the game becomes using this power to avoid obstacles and enemies in the pursuit of reaching inconveniently placed golden eggs. After being given this introduction to the game, players are then dumped into the first of the game's 100 levels.

The game starts off simply enough, but quickly ratchets up the difficulty as players progress through each stage, making progress increasingly challenging but rewarding at the same time. While the beginning of the game largely consists of basic obstacle avoidance, Gravity.Duck throws in rotating mechanics, enemies with different attacks, and more intricate environments to keep the game's puzzles somewhat interesting.

Gravity.Duck also presents itself rather simply, which serves to keep the focus on level design and the core gravity mechanic. While this seems to serve the game well at first, a little more variety across environments could have helped the game's staying power.

I am using these terms ("somewhat interesting" and "staying power") all because--despite Gravity.Duck's solid mechanics--it doesn't seem to hold up over time. While being perfectly fine, its gravity gimmick just doesn't pay off the way it feels like it should. Perhaps this is because the game seems intentionally low-fi, ignoring the potential that mid-air gravity switches or additional physics could add to the game's complexity.

All that being said, Gravity.Duck is perfectly competent on what it sets out to do, and will most likely please fans of the genre or any of Ravenous Games's previous titles.