Been on the hunt for some good games to try out on mobile. The name of this one is really what caught my attention. Clusterduck.
It’s a really simple game that seems to draw you in a lot more than I originally expected. Starting out with hatching a few normal birds, everything seems fine. But that’s not the way this game is meant to be played.
The whole point of Clusterduck is to start raising the strangest ducks you can. In doing so they will develop different strengths and you can use those to advance your teams further, but we’ll get into that more later. In the beginning you’re just hoping to see some mutations popping up and breeding those birds. Since you don’t select who breeds and it is just done randomly, you’ll have to remove the normies from the pack pretty quickly.
Once you start culling the normal birds from your pack, your chances of mutation increase greatly. The more eggs you hatch and the more abnormal the mutation causes the eggs to take longer to be ready to hatch. Luckily it’s measured in real time meaning you don’t even have to have the app open to run down the clock.
Mess around with the mutations long enough and you’ll start seeing some really neat things.
Now to get to this point you’ve have had to sacrifice a lot of birds down the ol’hole-in-the-ground. As satisfying as it can be, your culling will lead to some outcomes that are entirely necessary for the game to continue.
Once you sacrifice enough birds there are one of two things that will happen.
The first one is having a giant monster bird appear from the ground that you have to click away. After fending it off you will be rewarded with a special egg that’ll introduce a new mutation to the group.
The second thing that happens is what we’ve been building towards. Battle!
You’ll be taking into the underground with a random selection of your birds to do battle with another player somewhere else in the world. Different mutations have different benefits in the “battle”. You’re whole goal is just to win more rounds than your opponent.
Going back and forth the players pick a category for the round, pick their bird to represent the team, and send them out. If your bird has a higher score than you win, lower you lose, and a tie you both lose. Simple enough to understand and take only a basic level of strategy understanding to get through it successfully.
After fighting your way through this battle you’ll be rewarded with a special bird of some sort (assuming you win).
After playing for a while I was still finding myself interested in seeing what new features that I could create. The battle is simple yet satisfying and the game itself is easy to pick up and put down whenever you have a second to waste.
You’re also given the option of watching videos in order to boost some aspects of the game. That is something that I always appreciate. Being able to play a game truly for free is a big deal. If all you have to do is watch the occasional add to cover the cost, so be it.
So if you’re on the hunt for something easy to play this might be the game for you. Simple, easy and free!
Game Rating: Time Well Wasted
Find Clusterduck on the Google Play Store and the Apple Store
Phone used to play this game was a Samsung Galaxy S9. Although the phone is older, Clusterduck ran without issue.
