DuckLife2: World Champion Review

DuckLife2: World Champion
Flash
PC/Mac

DuckLife2: World Champion is a simple monster-raising game with engaging graphics and simple mini-games that makes for a very enjoyable experience.  Developer Sims5000 has proven that he has the ideas and skills to make fantastic games, and with a little more experience, will be a top tier game designer.

DuckLife2 is the sequel, obviously, to DuckLife.  You control a duck (although I think it looks much more like a chick) in a quest to become world champion.  Your Duck has stats for climbing, running, swimming, flying, and stamina.  Each of these is trained up through a different mini-game, and you then compete in races against other ducks.

That is the basic premise.  What makes this game so engaging is the training of the stats.  Running, swimming, climbing, and flying are all trained through very simple mini-games, where for the most part you are dodging obstacles.  These games are well settled to require only minimal grinding, and you almost never tire of them.  Stamina, however, is trained by feeding your duck special food, which you purchase with coins from winning races, and collecting during training mini-games.

Not is all good here, however.  Some of the training games (running comes to mind) are heavily luck based, while others (swimming, say) are fairly buggy.  This never completely stops the game, but it gets a bit annoying.  Also, in the flying game, you dodge obstacles until you lose momentum and crash into the water.  Since dodging obstacles is very easy, you basically play until you lose momentum.  Then you take your new experience, and try again, going a bit farther.  This basically means that you could just click a "level up" button and have pretty much the same experience.  On the one hand, I like that all the games are varied, both in the way they play, and the way they award experience.  However, some of them need a little re-balancing.

Additionally, the previous version has a special food you could purchase that allowed for stamina and minor stats increases.  I thought this was genius.  Since the running training is frustratingly random, I would simply train my other stats, win some races, and then use food to make up the running difference. This is not an option in the sequel, to its detriment.

As for the races themselves, they are absolutely genius.  The computer controls all the Ducks, yours included, so its up to you to get him ready.  The races are tiered, so you know about what level the competition will be at.  Some races are one skill (just swimming) some are a few skills (climbing then flying) and the championship races combine all 4 skills.  This adds some awesome strategy.  For example, you can train your swimming to max, and hope that your duck gets enough of a lead to ignore your weak flying ability.  Also, even with the races that use all 4 skills, some use more or less of a particular one.  The races are well animated. take the right amount of time to complete, and really exciting to watch.

But even here we see some small problems.  The races must be done in order, so you can't skip one where your skills are not up to par for later.  Also, your max level is controlled by your race tier, so for the final race, you generally just train to within two levels of max in each skill, meaning your duck pretty much always has to be well rounded.  To me, this is an example of the game idiot-proofing itself at the expense of strategy.

My only final complaint is the money system, until you win your first race, you don't have enough to train your stamina.  Once you win two races, you have more money than you can possibly spend.  Then, you beat the game, and they give you tons of coins... but you have literally nothing to spend it on?

Nonetheless, this game is awesome, and gets a really high recommendation.  Also, I think the developer has some great ideas, they just need a little fine polishing from someone who thinks a little bit more "technically" about game design.  This game has really cool humor and charm, and you will actually feel some sort of affinity for your duck.  There is probably an hour or so of gameplay here, maybe a bit more if you are a big fan. Everyone should check out DuckLife2: World Champion.  My highest recommendation.