With a name like “Pecker” and an eponymous main character that’s a bird with a giant beak, I have to admit I went into the game with somewhat low expectations. Coupled with the fact that Pecker is a 3D platformer, I was sure I was in for a late-‘90s/early-’00s-style edge-fest with lots of puerile, penis-based jokes.
In fact, Pecker is nothing of the sort. Rather, it focuses on its titular hero’s beak because the entire game is built around it.
Want to battle enemies or break the many fragile objects that populate Pecker’s world? You use your beak as a weapon, stabbing and smashing anything that gets in your way.
Want to solve puzzles? Your beak becomes a tool – admittedly, the tool’s main/only uses are to flick switches and rotate cogs, but still, the game finds a way of varying it up pretty well from puzzle to puzzle.
Most importantly, want to jump from place to place, climbing towers and flinging yourself across chasms? That’s arguably the most important thing in the game (seeing as it’s, you know, a 3D platformer), and Pecker’s beak is key to the whole endeavour: you stab it into whatever wood you can find, and fling yourself in whatever direction you want to go.
Admittedly, it’s also the most frustrating part of the game because it’s so inexact. While the game helpfully traces your rough arc, if you’re trying to string together a series of jumps it becomes more of a challenge. It also doesn’t help that if you fall from a great height, you’re pretty much guaranteed to die because you’ll be uselessly stabbing your beak into non-wooden objects. That’s part of the challenge, to be sure, but it’s still annoying.
But annoying or not, it’s a neat mechanic to build a platformer around, and Pecker does a good job of doing just that. Its name may evoke some of the lower points of 3D platformers from a few decades ago, but its gameplay recalls some of the better ones, and for that reason it’s worth investigating if you’re a fan of the genre.
Bold Head Interactive provided us with a Pecker PC code for review purposes.
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