Clusterduck Review (Android): an unusual game about collecting mutant ducks

Clusterduck, as you may guess from the name, is quite the game experience, so this review is here to give you a brief overview of what to expect from this… unusual mobile title about collecting mutant ducks.

And yes, you did read that right. Welcome to the Clusterduck Review, things are about to get a bit weird.

Clusterduck review – What is this madness?

What is Clusterduck?

Clusterduck was first brought to my attention via this GameExp page. Clusterduck is a freely available somewhat insane mobile game available on the App Store and Google Play.

There is a short trailer available that gives you a bit of an idea of the spirit of the game, and some of the more… sane duck variants available in the title. Consider yourself warned that Clusterduck gets pretty interesting.

Yeah, those are the sane ones. It’s just a… uniquely creative game, let’s put it that way.

What do you do in Clusterduck?

The main part of Clusterduck is this semi-idle gameplay screen, where Ducks will randomly wander around and drop a new egg into any unoccupied nests regularly. These eggs and Ducks are the core parts of the game.

Luckily the artwork that went into the various Duck Parts is quite interesting indeed, as you may have noticed from that trailer above.

The core gameplay loop effectively revolves around breeding new and increasingly weird kinds of duck via these eggs, as well as “collecting” ones with specific combinations of parts.

Undesirable ducks can be… gently disposed of, never to be seen again, via The Pit in the lower half of the screen.

There may be a surprise or two for players who feed The Pit particularly well.

For the breeding/collecting component of the game to take place, all you need to do is own a duck or two and let them waddle around doing what they like. It usually doesn’t take longer than 20 seconds before one decides to gift you with an egg.

These eggs then have a chance to inherit traits based on their parent traits, as well as random mutations. The mutations can be very, very creative. The changes that come from this combination is where your new parts come from, and then you can start selectively breeding what you want and throw the rest away, into that handy Pit we mentioned earlier.

Any issues to be aware of?

The game itself is honestly pretty simple, so there aren’t that many mechanics that can have issues and the like. Your mileage in the game may vary from how much you are bothered about repetitive/grindy processes – something you’ll have to deal with to make progress on collecting those ducks.

The only other real “issue” I encountered during my Clusterduck review play time was that the ads used for time-skip features and the like had no variance – I encountered precisely one ad, and it was 40s long.

That alone isn’t a huge issue, though the 40s timer was longer than many of the things I was trying to skip. And the advert couldn’t be cancelled out of via the back button without closing the entire game.

All in all I just avoided that issue by only skipping long timers – the usual ones aren’t particularly long anyway, but dropping the occasional 30s or 1 minute timer down to 5s is always nice.

Premium features

Clusterduck does offer great pricing on the premium support options – with a no-ads version of the game costing only £1.89. There are other options, such as Permanent extra nests or bonus maximum population, both costing only £0.89 each.

Clusterduck review – Summary

Clusterduck is a little hard to explain in all honesty due to the unusual premise of precisely how the mechanics work – with that said, if you’re looking for a fun and simple mobile game to kill some time with every so often, this is a pretty great pick.

The core gameplay loop is simple but very well executed, and the graphics are absolutely flawless for the purpose they need to serve – variety between each mutation and part a Duck can have. The game is a little light on variety, so you might get bored after a while, but Clusterduck can be good fun for the time it lasts.

Bonus points were awarded for the excellent and unexpected variety in vocalisations by the Ducks adding a good level of comedy to the game – similar to with Graphics, the audio does absolutely everything it needs to do for Clusterduck, though perhaps lets the high standards set by the graphical variety of parts down slightly with a comparatively lesser variety of Duck sounds.

All in all though, it’s certainly a game to try if it catches your attention.

Anything else I need to know?

Honestly, not really. Clusterduck is quite the compact game – either you enjoy the basic gameplay loop and its overall theme or it just might not be for you. The overall package is certainly worth giving a try once though, just to find out.

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