LifeisXbox’s Tony & Clyde review | Tony and Clyde is brought to us by DCF Studios and sets us in the story of two renegades looking for money, fame, bullets, … The whole whazoo. I had honestly never heard of this game, but when we got the opportunity to review this one I immediately jumped to sink my teeth in this one. It promises a lot when you look at the official store page. Infinite ammo, carnage everywhere. Blood and bodies around every corner. Style. Pure manly man testosterone rushing through the testies of these guys. Thus it happened, I downloaded the game and got ready for an emotional rollercoaster… I wish I never had. Want to know why? Then wait no longer and read all about it in this twin-stick horror of a game review that is called … Tony & Clyde!
This is a short review, our usual the good, mixed and the bad was difficult because of the nature of this game. We played Tony and Clyde for 3 hours on Xbox Series X. This game is also available on Playstation
When a game hypes themselves up as they do on the store page. I should have known already. I should have known that the game would be nothing as it promises itself to be. But for some ungodly reason, I still get suckered in by it. Why? I don’t know… I really REALLY don’t. But I do. After watching the intro movie that looks “okay”. It doesn’t shine, with awkward silences here and there. I mean, sure… I get it if this was real life, but, this is a game, guys. There is no reason why you should keep the hand-drawn camera on a bartender that is saying nothing, and the other characters aren’t saying anything either. And while I was keeping my hopes high, they got dashed hard when I suddenly noticed that the voice actors in this intro sounded like they recorded their lines through a cheap microphone. Okay, this is an indie… But come on. Do some effort cleaning up your audio! Damnit! So I skipped it, hoping that the game would be better. TLDR? It isn’t.
As I loaded into the first chapter, the tutorial is shown by pop-ups that stay in place and don’t vanish even when you move away from it. Hindering your locked-in place DYNAMIC CAMERA? Come on! If you advertise it as one of your key selling points, the camera! Give us the opportunity to control it! But, I looked even past this and went on to kill my first enemy. What? Did I see this right? Thus I shot again. And oh my god, this should have an epilepsy warning! The sides light up and flicker with every shot, which could easily cause a seizure. On top of that, I noticed a tiny frame drop with every bullet that I shot. Shame on your devs! How do you not notice this? After this, I slinked over to the next enemy NPC, where it gave me a prompt to kill the next one with a melee attack… Which proceeds to eat up the FPS so much, that it slows down to a slide show. UGH!
That this game is badly coded shows itself further down the line when it becomes apparent that your enemies can shoot through objects that you can NOT shoot through, like doors. This actually caused me to get stuck in the first level, because there was one enemy behind a door, that, once aggro’d, shot me through a door that I could not. When I eventually got past this, after a patch dropped mind you, I started chapter two. Where even more issues became obvious. Once you shoot the first NPC? The entire map knows where you are and thus proceeds to come for your booty! Resulting in me just standing at the start for a couple of minutes so that everyone on the map just funneled through the hallway and made an easy kill. Yet, after I got everyone, the game didn’t end? So I started roaming around, hoping to find a juice man maybe, which is the equivalent of a drug dealer I think, but also is your “new weapon unlocked” guy if you kill him. And while I didn’t find anyone, I noticed that when I entered a certain corridor, the camera suddenly jerks in for a close-up and proceeds to spawn in two enemies behind you that immediately unload their gun into your back, resulting in a game over! WHAT! I have heard about cheap tricks to prolong games, but this is just outrageous! In my opinion, Tony and Clyde are the epitome of badly coded disasters. Why? Let’s take a closer look at the audio. I know that a catchphrase here and there is fun, especially if they’re good. In this game? They’re not. Even more, they are blurted out every 5 to 10 seconds, even when there is no action at all! I mean… come on! At least do that right! Catchphrases are there to put an emphasis on something big happening. Look at the Terminator’s “I’ll be back” (though now the guy is more likely to say, oomph my back), or the iconic “Game over man, game over!”. Even visually it doesn’t work properly. With NPC’s often glitching out when they ragdoll on the floor and the color scheme is every shade of darkness that you could possibly imagine, and walls look like they came out of a rusty scene? No. This is just an abomination… Sadly enough. Because you can clearly see that they tried to make it something great and worthwhile, but clearly overshot their expectations…
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