Review | Ayo the Clown

LifeisXbox’s Ayo the Clown review | Ayo lives a peaceful life in his quiet hometown. He spends most of his time with his talented circus dog, Bo. They juggle in the park and hang out at the carnival. Until one day something terrible happens: Bo goes missing. Ayo sets out on a journey to find his best friend and you’re going to help him! With Ayo the Clown, developer Cloud M1 wants to reintroduce a fun platformer game like they had in the ’90s where platforming meets a memorable story. So, a cute little 2.5D platformer that followers a boy in search of his dog? Well, count me in!

ℹ️ | Maui played Ayo the Clown for 5 hours on Nintendo Switch. This game is also available on Steam (PC).

What we liked!

• Travel through beautiful regions with a good soundtrack | You’ll be traveling through a diverse world on your adventures with our adorable little clown. You start with some levels in farm stages, where you’ll be facing cows, pigs, and yes, even bags of floor or whatever those were. I did not enjoy killing the cows etc seeing as I’m a big animal lover, but hey, the levels themselves were always very cute and cool to look at. I especially loved candy land but I’m also a sucker for anything water and beach releated, so I enjoyed my time amongst the sharks and crabs as well. I feel like you’ll never get bored of seeing all the stages in this game, because they just all look so lively and are a job to discover. The soundtrack is just as cute, and manages to fit in with the game in every way. It’s not too energetic, but not too calm either so it’s pretty neat. And everytime Ayo falls, you hear him screaming ‘aaaaaa’ with an echo, which I rather enjoyed.
• An adorable game | When I first laid eyes on Ayo the Clown, I immediately thought the art style was very cute. However, I thought it might come off as a little childish with the cute little clown and the adorable 3D graphics. Luckily, once I started playing the game, I didn’t look at the game this way anymore, and I just really loved taking in at all the environments, enemies, and just everything that the developers so beautifuly designed. You’ll be traveling through some very brightly colored scenes, and it felt like a perfect platformer for the Nintendo Switch.
• Variety | Besides some variety in regions, there are also various weapons to be found along the way, including simple swords and a big toy hammer. Some parts of a level even let you drive a tank for a little while or fly a helicopter! This is pretty standard in those typical platformers and reminded me of Donkey Kong and more recently driving a cart in Stitchy in Tooki Trouble. I also found the platforming in itself quite diverse. There are moving platforms, different kinds of obstacles, mud, pigs to jump on, and so much more keeping the levels from getting repetitive and boring. Sometimes there are boss levels (which I found to be quite difficult at times, but never unbeatable), or parts where you have to climb as fast as you can before the screen/lava/whatever catched up to you. It was really interesting to see that the developers put so much effort in keeping the gameplay diverse. I felt like almost ever stage introduced new things, and I was always excited to advance to the next chapter in Ayo the Clown. You’ll be facing many enemies, including crabs, cows, monkeys, and so so SO many more. I absolutely loved the wide variety of enemies, and they all looked pretty amazing too. And lastly, Ayo can perform different attacks. There your basic jumping on enemies, but picking up weapons allows you to fight enemies, as well as doing head stomps, sliding down, or wall jumping.
• Help Ayo grow | Ayo starts out as a simple clown that doesn’t have a lot of special abilities. However, on his journey, he meets various characters that all need a little help. After helping them out with a simple task, our little clown gets a new ability. And this keeps happening throughout the game. Gradually, you can perform more actions, and this is, again, something that keeps the gameplay interesting. Another something you gain along the way are hearts. Ayo starts with three hearts. If he loses those, he loses a life and respawns at the last checkpoint. Luckily, there are plenty of checkpoints, a decent amount of lives (which can also be upgraded), and a growing amount of hearts.
• Tailored to completionists | Want to go the extra mile, or are you just a completionist? Ayo the Clown has a few things in store for you! First of all, every stage has three teddybears and three lollypops hidden in it. Sometimes, these are easy to spot, but most of the time, they are hidden or placed in ‘difficult’-to-reach places. There is a treasure chest which you can fill with ten random toys you find throughout the levels, so there is that too. Every level also has a time indication on how long it took you to finish the game, so you can always try to beat your own score if that makes you happy. And last, you also get some kind of score for each level, like A, B, C. I’m not sure how to get what score but sometimes I got an A, sometimes a B, and other times a C for a certain stage.
  

Somewhere between

• Abilities aren’t always that great | Even though there is a variety of abilities that you’ll learn along the way, they aren’t always very pleasant to use. I especially disliked the sliding ability because it didn’t seem to work like it should. Ayo just didn’t want to slide, or stopped halfway, and this got a bit frustrating up to the point I barely used it anymore. Head stomps weren’t always great because something this stubborn little clown didn’t perform one when he should, or he did one when he didn’t have to. All very annoying, of course. I feel like the abilities need a little more tweaking.
• Gems | There are a lot of gems to be collected in the levels. These work as coins, so that’s pretty standard. I, however, found these to be pretty useless. You need 25 000 gems to buy something (like a better balloon that allows you to fly higher) which is a crazy high amount. I feel like most people will be near the end when they finally achieve this many gems, so it seems pretty useless. A casual shop with some simple upgrades or customisation options would’ve been so much better. Right now, I did not feel motivated to collect gems because some gems were only worth 2, so I wasn’t very excited about going after them.

What we disliked

• Nothing here.

How long to beat the story | 4 to 8 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | No achievements on Switch.
Similar with | Mario, Donkey Kong, …

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