The Last Tinker: City Of Colors is an action adventure game due for release later this year from Mimimi Productions. I was sent a preview of the game late last week which contains around one hour of gameplay. My article is based on this content alone, and should not be considered a review.
The game is set in Tinkerworld, a vibrant world where everything is constructed from colour, paper and glue. Anything is possible to build with these materials provided the residents have enough imagination. You play as Koru who lives in the slums known as Colourtown. The introduction tells you that Colourtown is suffering from the Bleakness, which has changed the fortunes of the city, making people lazy and losing creativeness. Your task is to find out what is going wrong and fix it.
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You start the game at home and the first part of the game introduces you to the different mechanics found in it. The goal is to take part and compete in a race but first you must complete a few tasks to be able to enter it. The world is a 3D platform game, so accurate controls are a must and the developers have taken an interesting route to doing this. For movements such as jumping over gaps and climbing ladders it is done automatically, there is no need to judge the distance for jumps. You simply walk or run to the edge while holding a button and the game will do the hard work for you. I was initially sceptical about this method but once you get the hang of it, it takes the stress of miss-jumps which can be very annoying in games.
Combat is handled in a similar way, much like Fable where it the controls are simplified but they allow you to have more fun with combat. Attacks on multiple enemies can be performed by aiming in their direction and can be chained for greater damage. You only get two opportunities to fight in the preview, but from what I tried it works very well.
Other mechanics you briefly get to experience include an opportunity to direct characters by whistling. In one part you must direct a character to grow mushrooms. There is a small puzzle element involved as the character is too big to fit under a gap so you must find a way to shrink him and then overcome the gap yourself before directing him under.
Along the way you get to meet various residents of Colourtown. Each have their own shades of colour and you start to learn that residents of other towns are starting to divide based on their colour. It was interesting to see a game tackle the subject of racism, something that is almost unheard of. I look forward to see how this subject is expanded on in the final game.
Graphically the game looks great. The world is very bright and colourful, reminding me of the Xbox 360 game Viva Pinata in look and style. The various residents come in different shapes and sizes and gives the impression that the world is very varied. The music works very well with soft guitar tracks while exploring, ramping up a few notches when there is action. Gameplay feels right from what I experienced, there was no annoying miss-jumps or falling off the edges. The balance of exploration, action and puzzle solving seems about right for an introduction to the game.
The Last Tinker: City Of Colors is due for release this Summer on PC, Mac, Linux, and consoles. I for one, can’t wait to explore further in to Tinkerworld! You can find out more information on the homepage at http://www.mimimi-productions.de/the-last-tinker/.
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