Gravity Duck

[Play Gravity Duck] Game Description: Your God has sent you on a mission to find him some golden eggs. Your only tool is the ability to flip gravity. Use gravity wells to further alter the direction of gravity. Challenge yourself to 40 levels. | In this exciting new platform, puzzler, your goal is to complete each level, with the help of your only ability, gravity! Bring all forty golden eggs back to your God and be rewarded with riches! Gravity Duck is completely controlled with the arrow and “x” keys.

Gravity Duck relied completely on the spike walls (that punch into the gravel every couple of seconds) to make the game difficult and honestly, that worked very well, considering I ended up being stuck on every level 30-40 for thirty minute increments (most likely exaggerated) just because my timing on those were off. any level that didn’t includes those, I breezed through, but any level that did took a ton of concentration and made the game have an unnecessary difficulty factor, that without would have improved the game, in my mind, drastically. The window on how long the spike walls stayed up was insane, it had to be less than a second, that included your reaction time and the time it took you to cross underneath the structure, there just wasn’t enough time and I would have liked to see those walls be toned down a bit, simplified and set the timer to at least two seconds. Besides that problem, the difficulty was pretty good throughout the game, but eventually the developer started relying on these spike walls to make the game more difficult, until the only thing that stopped you from achieving your golden egg in each level was those spike walls.

The idea of making the game completely based on changing the gravity, to help you manuever around a level was a terrific idea and concept that I haven’t seen before, it was genius, but even more genius was the character, he’s so cute and I believe that’s why so many people have fallen in love with the game already, the duck was a terrific idea! The only small flaw that I saw was that there was no way to jump (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that would make the game too easy, I’m just putting ideas out there) and that confused me at times, simply because almost every single platformer I’ve ever seen has a key to jump and when you transfer over to a game that you can’t jump it’s hard to get that through your head and accept the fact that no matter what you do, you can’t jump and your just going to have to rely on gravity to move you from place to place. That was a pretty interesting concept in the game, is the ability to not be able to jump, because you have to think outside the box and develop strategies on how you are going to move throughout the level in a fashion that only requires the changing of gravity.

Gravity Duck

The art was amazing, as you may know, I’m a sucker for the pixel graphics, I just love the simple retro, easy-going look that they provoke. It’s probably just some nostalgia-like feeling. One of the main reasons why I liked the pixel graphics displayed in Gravity Duck is the intricate designs and backgrounds (okay that may be two!) that is possess. All the sprites are equally beautiful.

Another great future of Gravity Duck was the sound, it kind of goes along with the graphics, simple a beautiful. The background music provided an energetic theme and went hand-in-hand with the quick-paced theme of the game, whereas everything is always moving, it’s a lively scene. The sound effects worked well with the background music and weren’t too loud, nor too quite, but just in-between, which in turn made the game musically appealing. Overall, the background music and the sound effects were perfect!

The difficulty ramp remained is a progressive state throughout the game, proceeding with more and more difficult levels as time progresses. As I earlier stated I would have liked the difficulty ramp not to be based off of the spike walls, but over time I did notice that the level progressively used more and more gravity wells and required more problem solving, but the spike walls did seem to be my main problem throughout the entire game. Either way, the difficulty ramp did allow users to ease into the concept and understand all of Gravity Duck’s idea so that they aren’t confused in future events.

The weakest point of Gravity Duck was indisputable the replay value, there was absolutely no incentive to even continue the game itself, without the hopes that you’ll become rich when you return the golden eggs to your God. SPOILER: Don’t read this if you haven’t completed the game yet! I thought the ending was pretty funny myself, though it wasn’t as funny, because people were talking about it in the comments and then when I finally achieved the reward, I knew that I would have probably laughed a lot harder if I didn’t know that all of my hard work was going to waste for a top-hat, but still a Duck with a top-hat on, what you be better, am I right? END SPOILER There wasn’t any in-game achievements, I would have liked to see a couple, but atlas there wasn’t, but the game was fun enough to to be let alone, without those features.

Overall, Gravity Duck was a truly epic game, it doesn’t get much better than a duck as the main character, that’s for sure. If you’re a fan of the platform, puzzlers genre then you’re in for a treat when you play Gravity Duck! The difficulty was perfect, though the developer, in my opinion, over-used the spike walls that crash down at you, there was such as small time frame to fit in, in the time it took for the spike wall to go up and then smash back down, that it became more of luck then actual skill. The difficulty ramp worked perfectly, allowing the user to learn the concept, controls and everything about the game first, before being challenged to some of the tougher level, (to be exact, levels 1-9 seemed to be more tutorials levels than anything.) later on in the game, which included more new features to further challenge you. The art was terrific, I love pixel art and this game was truly pulchritudinous. The background music was amazing and had an energetic feel to it that got you in the mood for this fast-paced game; sound effects were also well established. The replay value was a weak point of Gravity Duck, but the game was long enough to make that seem as not such a big problem, considering you could be able to complete the game in around an thirty to forty-five minutes if you were to do a speed-run (though I assume that there has to be people out there that could complete it in less than fifteen minutes if they really practiced the game.). All in all, Gravity Duck was an amazing platform puzzler and if you have the time be sure to check it out! [Play Gravity Duck]