Chip N Clawz vs The Brainioids Review
CH-CH-CH-Chip N Clawz, it’s not a great name.CH-CH-CH-Chip N Clawz, surprisingly fun game.
Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers jokes aside, once you get past the silly title of Snapshot Games latest game, you realize that Chip N Clawz vs The Brainioids is like pineapple on pizza. Two things that shouldn’t go together, but pair surprisingly well once you give it a chance. Gameplay is a harmonious blend of RTS and Third Person Action, with the result being a completely different experience than what you’re familiar with in either genre. This is bundled with aesthetic that appears to be heavily inspired by Ratchet and Clank and a tone that brings some serious 90’s Saturday morning cartoon energy. Just like Pineapple Pizza, it’s not perfect, it’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s a nice change of pace.
Chip N Clawz vs The Brainiods Review
Earth is being invaded by aliens, which as of late seems like the least of our concerns. Brainiods from a distant galaxy are trying to steal all of Earth’s Brainium crystals. You play a Chip N Clawz, a young inventor and his Ratchet-like robo-cat. If it looks like a 90’s Saturday morning cartoon, it talks like it too. Chip N Clawz features exactly the type of dialogue you would expect, which would typically be grating after a short period, but it shows restrain for the most part, you don’t hear too many repeated lines and the game is self aware. The characters crack jokes about how poor some of the enemies names are or even Clawz mentioning to Chip that he should dial down the puns.
The gameplay loop starts out slightly different from your traditional RTS. Although the first thing that you need to do is start mining brainium crystals, you need to first find the mining replikon. Finding Replikons is one of the unique aspects of Chip N Clawz as you never start with the ability to build anything, but instead you have to find and quickly capture glowing nodes which give you the ability to create certain buildings.
While this mechanic might sound tedious to find these Replikons every mission, you always start out right in front of the mining Replikon. It works in this setup, because if you started with the ability to build any building or unit, you would use the same strategy every level and it would eliminate the emergent gameplay moments.
There are nine different Replikons in Chip N Claws which include more stationary items like the mining factory and defence turret. Then there are the attack bot Replikons, which allow you to build a range of bots from air units to melee and ranged. As you would expect, just like other RTS games, different units have different strengths against other units with a rock/paper/scissors dynamic.
RTS is not a genre that typically plays well on controller, but putting these mechanics into a third person action is incredibly easy to pick up and play. You quickly build units, set waypoints, which can either be done with the click of a button for speed or by zooming out into the commander mode for more precision. On the battlefield you have the ability to repair and overclock friendly units and even get involved in combat with melee or ranged weapons.
The campaign should take you about 8 hours, which spans across three chapters with thirteen main missions and ten optional side missions. The plot is forgettable as you dispatch brain in jar after brain in jar. Prior to the start of each mission, you will be able to change you load out and bring in perks, but only three, which makes decision making tough even before touching the battlefield.
To gain new perks, such as a stronger HQ, faster unit production or higher melee damage, you need to find blueprints on the battlefield and then secondly you need to unlock them with money that you are awarded at the end of each level depending on how well you performed. The story might not compel you to do the side missions, but finding the blueprint on each one might.
The single player campaign can be played fully offline, but there is also the option to play the campaign in co-op using split screen local play or by using the crossplay buddy pass. Which Hazelight seems to have made mainstream as it only requires one purchase. There are also a variety of PVP modes including 1v1, which can also be played split screen localally and then 1v1 and 2v2 online.
CRITICISMS
When a game looks as similar as it does to Ratchet and Clank, it’s hard not to draw comparisons such as how it controls and feels. It’s not bad, but the platforming felt a little clunky, the movement felt a little floaty and the melee combat lacked weight and impact. It also lacked a coherent art style as they were bouncing between cinematics that looked almost claymation, combined with the in game style and then stills were comic styled. The ending felt slightly incomplete and abrupt as well.
On a systems level, my biggest issue was that the game limits your brainium crystal mining to 1000, no matter how many mining depots you have. This felt unfair and slowed down momentum. The crystal depots also ran out of resources too quickly, which led to a lot of mining bot micro managing.
You get to control either Chip who has the ability to overclock the bots, which makes them faster, but Clawz has the ability to repair, which has a substantially higher importance making picking Chip definitively the wrong answer. One area that felt forgotten was that even though Clawz had the repair ability, he was unable to repair HQ, which feels like a basic RTS element.
Is Chip N Clawz vs The Brainioids Worth it?
As someone who grew up up playing RTS games like Warcraft, StarCraft, Command and Conquer, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires and countless others, I have been on what feels like a never-ending search to find another RTS game that doesn’t feel like something I have already experienced. While there have been a lot of great RTS games since, they lacked something unique. What I wasn’t expecting was to find it blended with a third person action.
Earlier we compared Chip N Clawz to pineapple pizza, a great combination, but something that won’t be for everyone with the biggest deterrent being the aesthetic and tone because the gameplay is plenty of fun
Chip N Clawz is light-hearted game that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Incorporating RTS elements into a third person action shouldn’t work as well as it does, but this combo is what elevates what would otherwise be a forgettable third person action game into unique experience for fans of both genres.
