Stickmen Studios | Oct 15, 2010
Doc Clock is an interesting Platform based Puzzle game. Ok, it’s way more platform game than puzzle game. All of the puzzle part involves assembling various parts you find along the way into different vehicles.
The basic plot involves Doc Clock and his robot backpack companion. You start out in Doc Clock’s lab and after accidentally turning your cat into a plant, you set out to build a time machine so you can travel back in time 5 minutes to save your cat. By mistake, you travel many many years into the future and the time machine parts become scattered throughout the area. As you trek along, you discover more and more parts for the time machine in each level. You also find a variety of parts to augment the time machine into something more versatile. There are wheels of several sizes, propellers to help you fly for increasingly longer periods of time, umbrellas to help you float instead of just falling and springs to help give you a quick jump. There are also junk parts like refrigerators that can be used as battering rams if needed.
This vehicle aspect is fairly neat though unfortunately not nearly as dynamic as it sounds. Most levels involve slapping wheels on the basic time machine, the umbrella on top and positioning the propellers to give the best control while airborne. This is a bit of a complaint, though on the other hand, if it had been more complex you’d end up stopping constantly to reconfigure the vehicle, which would slow the game’s pace down to a slow boring trudge. So in the end I suppose it’s a decent balance. Also, though you collect a large assortment of propellers over the course of the game, you only really ever need 2-3 of the more powerful one’s in your inventory at any given time.
The world wouldn’t be much fun without some sort of confrontation. In the future, robots have destroyed all life and human kind and have taken over the planet. Unfortunately they are also all idiots, which is part of the game’s plot to some level, though it also means they really aren’t much of a threat. Robots are killed by simply ramming into them. Most of them simply stand around chatting to each other, occasionally there are robots that throw rocks at you.
The game is also full of some reasonable though cheesy humor. A lot of this is delivered through insults from the Backpack robot or in the previously mentioned dialogues between enemy robots. There is a some vague plot implications going on involving the dystopian future being Doc Clock’s fault.
In general, it’s a fairly simple game, though it’s pretty fun as a basic platform game. It’s real problem is it’s lack of any true difficulty. Many of the levels are easily passed by assembling a basic flying car and blasting through the level jumping when need be. There is a bit of trickiness added to the later levels when the lava shows up but it’s still nothing too complex. It’s fun, but a little easy.
Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich of Time can be found on Steam here.
