Publisher: Loot Entertainment
Developer: Mimimi/Loot Entertainment
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: E10+
A word to the wise: if and when you play The Last Tinker: City of Colors, have a pair of sunglasses on hand. Or have your contrast or gamma or brightness or whatever turned way, waaaay down. Orโฆwell, do whatever you can to dim the screen a little, because the gameโs default setting is, apparently, โhideous eyesoreโ. (Note: thereโs also a color-blind version. This does not look substantially better, though the colors are more puke-inspired than eye-searing, soโฆprogress?)
And once you have muted The Last Tinkerโs colors, what then? Does that make it worth playing? In a nutshell: yep.
See, this game is a throwback to Ratchet & Clank, to Jak & Daxter, to Sly Cooper: to all those excellent 3D platformers that, other than Knack and maybe Rayman, donโt seem to appear much on non-Nintendo platforms anymore. Youโve got your animal character with an attitude (in this case, a simian named Koru), youโve got a sidekick (a pig-sheep-hybrid-thingy called Tap), youโve got a couple of different worlds to explore โ basically, it hews very closely to the formula established by those games, and it does that extremely well. Throw in hint of de Blob, with the heavy emphasis that color plays in The Last Tinkerโs storyline, and Tearaway, with the use of papercraft in some of the environments, and youโve got a pretty good idea of what youโre in for here.
Admittedly, this seems to be a little more child-oriented than any of those games. If that wasnโt obvious from the color palette โ that, again, looks like technicolor rainbow vomit โ then it should be from the controls. You canโt jump, which isโฆwell, kind of crazy when you think about it, since this is a platformer weโre talking about. As you can imagine, not needing to press the jump button makes things significantly easier than in any of those aforementioned predecessors. (In fairness, as you progress through the game, timing your forward motion matters a little more, but it still doesnโt quite have the same feel.)
Despite that โ and, not to drive this into the ground, despite that godawful color scheme โ The Last Tinker is still a wonderful game. It may not stray very far from its influences, but considering how well it borrows from them, it hardly needs to. This is an adorable, easy-to-love game, and itโs well worth a play.