Chuck’s Challenge 3D Review

Chuckin’ Away the Time

Chuck’s Challenge 3D, the spiritual successor to Chip’s Challenge from way back on the Atari Lynx, is a charming looking puzzle game.

It starts off with a simple, metro style menu with only five options, and the gameplay is equally as simple, at least to start. More and more gameplay mechanics are revealed over time to help you hard the puzzles that constantly increase in difficulty, but they are added in slowly, so that you can get the hang of each one before you move on to something more challenging.

Originally, the game started to bore me, with the charming visuals only carrying the game so far. But once I got to the tougher puzzles, the fun really began, and it doesn’t ever have to stop. Despite there being only 125 levels in the game, there is an included level editor in the PC version, and a puzzle of the week to highlight really challenging and fun community made ones.

“there is no conflict, no driving action”

Your objective in the game is simple, get out of the puzzle, and the backstory just gives you enough of a nudge to want to do that, keeping the focus on the puzzles themselves, which is slightly annoying. You play as Woop, a cute little purple alien who recruits Chuck Sommerville to create games for him. That’s it. Sommerville obviously accepts the position from Woop, but there is no conflict, no driving action. Maybe there doesn’t need to be in a puzzle game all of the time, but then again, it feels weird to have the beginnings of a story there.

The aforementioned level editor is something that could be polished up a bit as well. The lack of a tutorial and descriptions of what each tool does makes it difficult to get started creating levels. But once you do get the hang of it, it actually is quite fun.

The brightly colored sprites are typical of many mobile games, but the graphics here are higher than average quality, looking just fine on my PC monitor as well. This is definitely an issue of personally preference, but I find them fitting for the genre.

The controls were tight when I played on my laptop using my arrow keys, but as soon as I hooked up my Xbox 360 controller to my gaming PC, the “partial gamepad support” felt more like a joke than anything, with the game improperly reading joystick movements. I do hope this issue gets patched soon, so I can sit back and enjoy this game in a more casual setting.

SpawnFirst Recommends…

If you played and enjoyed Chip’s Challenge back in the day, or just enjoy a good puzzle game in general, you should pick up Chuck’s Challenge 3D.

I also recommend the PC version because games the require this much movement deserve some sort of controller in my opinion. Either way though, $10 will get you more than enough fun than you’d expect in a simple little package. Overall, this is a solid, cheap puzzle game that is certainly worth your time if you are a fan of the genre.