Rise of the Clockwork Stallions

Clockwork Stallions is a platformer game made in Game Maker. It's a rather tedious and cringeworthy platformer game now that I think about it. You'll have some fun for about 1 hour then swiftly close it and never talk to anyone about it.



Demo1  Demo2  Demo3??
The premise of the game is that metallic clockwork aliens in the form of horses are attacking Ponyville and are helding your friends captive. You must now save the pony world from the robot stallion menace. Many other people have tried this whole generic idea with environmental peaceful creatures against tech-heavy invasion robots and it simply can't mix in a flowing manner without looking out of place and shoehorned in.

The premise spells out bad taste in every way and waves like a red flag in my face for what's to come. Why can't they make a game about the invasion of the griffons and dragons? Or the secrets of the everfree forest and something related to the cartoon show which copies season 1's episodes. Perhaps something from generation 1.

The game creator ChurchCrusade/Darkera Studios has made some very poorly GameMaker-esque games in the past before going onto ponies. Also notice how he copy-pasted the sound effects from his old games into the pony game. He doesn't shy away from hitting every bad game cliche on Game Maker's list of flaws and crappily made games in the past. From terrible optimization to crappy artstyle, not a speck of smart AI, graphical glitches, code glitches, lack of physics, lack of integrated save files and game menu options, baby's first programming course, constant crashes and all the worst which game maker studio has to offer.

You can hold down Ctrl to run faster. Why the hell isn't it assigned to C or Z, i don't know.
Also please press ESC to exit a level instead of letting your ponies jump in bottomless pits just to escape this shitty game which sucks ass.
These are some things which the game forgets to mention enough times.
The game values quantity over quality, which is perfect for my review if I plan on detailing every single flaw, which I will.

Now let's see those graphics, yes the most important aspect after gameplay.
Let's take a looksie at the background, foregrounds and characters artstyle and shading...

6 billion years of evolution and this is the best drawn tree he can come up with.

Applejack would be so proud, ah wait no, she just has no mouth to scream in horror.

 

Chop this fucking house down!!

 

                                                               

 Have some shitty sprites.

If you're still here and didn't vomit or immediately closed the browser then I salute you.

Ah yes just look at that lovely scenery, those oh so detailed cracks in the ground, the talented drawn backgrounds of Ponyville, the apple trees, the ponies' artstyle and Rarity's glitch fest.

So is the animation for the characters at least decent to compensate for it? To simply put it.. No.

The ponies have no jumping animations, no crouching animations, no turning animations, no attack animations, no head bobbing, hair and tail animations... the only thing animated is their walk cycle and that looks terrible too. The animations are instead spent on the bosses which still look like crap. 

This is one of those cases where I'd beg someone to use the desktop ponies. They didn't have a jump and attack animation either, but dear lord at least they looked good when walking across your screen.

The thing is that Game Maker does support highly detailed pixel art, if somebody took the time and effort to work in it then you'd get something good.


Let's take a look at the magic behind these graphics. Surely he must be hard at work, tracing and redrawing every step and double-checking for quality control. Of course he doesn't. Let me just put away this sarcasm for a minute. Even sped up he just uses like 40-60 minutes for a really poor MSPaint result when other artists take days and weeks to work on a level's graphics. NES graphics are a masterpiece compared to this.

Instead he has the time to copy-paste completely unfitting explosions and other weird looking effects on top of his ms paint mastery.

The thing is that it's not just his lack of art style and animation skills, it's also his lack of AI coding, physics, level design and general design effort which makes Church a terrible game designer.
If /mlp/ were ignorant and stubborn as this game's creator then they'd probably create a pretty good bitchin game. The creator also didn't release the source code as per usual of every ego-centric uncaring person which feels obligated to never release their work online to let people edit it and possibly improve on it. Though it's not like anyone would bother improving on it when everything is shitty, not just the replaceable graphics and animations.

The level design is this horizontal rectangle that features for every stage which makes the levels a dull copy of eachother instead of a unique take on each location. The pyramid level was the only one which seemed to have some more thought put into it and dared to go beyond the rectangle box and make a good unique pathway for the player. But I've seen far far better level design even in Mushroom Kingdom Fusion, and that game is a mess. Most of the levels cater to the pegasus ponies which have many more jumps than the others. The levels will always have hard-to-reach ledges which require a pegasus, so if you plan to beat these levels and especially get the crown jewels then you are gonna require wings. Any earth or unicorn pony without at least 4 jumps is going to eventually get you stuck somewhere in a level sooner or later.

The physics and collision are non existent and the trampolines have an awkward jump. There is no slight ending movement before your character stops or any kind of inertia, momentum, acceleration. It has no weight just like in Megaman, while Sonic and Super Mario Bros always had weight and inertia put to them, that's how you get to do those great physic tricks in them.

The AI doesn't react to your actions, but it doesn't even have it's own set of moves, a move palette. The enemies in the game just run left and right without caring on which side you are. There's a few which ocassionaly jump and run towards you, but again that's not intelligent, they don't have any interesting attacks and states and don't give you any fun openings to dispose of them. Plus the enemies aren't very diverse at all. You keep fighting the same enemies over and over again even when the setting begs for a different set of enemies. Again robots do not fit in the fantasy realm, especially robots which look like robots. Rather than say robot-themed animals like Sonic or Freedom Planet which did a much better job at incorporating the robot-theme into the grassy fantasy setting.

The characters' abilities mostly consist of long-range attacks, fitting considering how fast the enemies bump into you. But unfortunately you cannot aim this range attack in 6 or 8 directions, you can only target it horizontally. The projectiles are also limited, you can only have around 3 or 4 projectiles at a time on the screen, which means you can close in on the enemy to mass spam him, which is a bad design choice, the projectiles should have a cooldown between each strike rather than a number limit.

The jumping is poorly made as hell, rather than giving you a few good long jumps, you instead get mini-jumps which you can easily waste and fall into a pit to your doom. Also no jump animation.
A special character like Luna has 8 jumps, but because you only recharge your jumps when you land on ground you'll waste them everytime in the water levels because water is not ground, so you'll never be able to jump out of the water and fly out, another glitch design which the not-so-humble creator didn't expect.

You will often fall into pits trying to figure out if they lead somewhere or not(often times there's secrets at the bottom, sometimes there aren't). You can't climb up or down on the walls and in some cases there's no way to identify if it's a death pit or a secret entrance. More than enough you'll have to go through walls to reach the secrets(Master emeralds/Crown jewels which you need to obtain to advance to the next stages) which will cause you a number of needless deaths.


The gameplay of Clockwork Stallions will always consist of jump-flying and shooting enemies from a-far or speedrunning through the levels. That's the gist of it. Remember to use Shift to run faster.
It's a very boring gameplay even when it works as intended and the difficulty settings will not change it at all. If you're a good platformer player then you'll breeze through this and find it extremely boring and tedious and the complete opposite of challenging.

Weirdly enough you can jump on the mobs' heads dealing damage, I wasn't expecting that and neither was the creator, for there is no visual or sound effect to show you jumping on the enemy's head and not on his shoulder or damage box. Sadly you cannot use the enemies as springers like other classic games would let you do.
If you're sick of range-attacking enemies due to how easy it is then go down-left in the character menu and select a white pegasus with a giant axe. Unfortunately there are very few melee attackers, when in fact every character should have a melee, range and special attack, instead the game prefers to make every character as 1 dimensional as possible.
You can't duck to evade fast projectiles so instead you have to jump over them. You also can't block and don't have a shield ability or special bombs or anything substantial and refreshing to cut from the monotony of the poorly-made megaman shooter gameplay. The characters are copies of the first 2 or so. The character which do have special abilities are lacking in everything else, so it's best to not pick them.
Your partner's AI is really terrible, it doesn't shoot as much as it should and it never jumps where you want it to and it never uses it's charge up attack, and no sadly you cannot just switch your pony partner in mid-game because the creator's programming skills are too shitty and undeveloped to realize how to implement it, hence why there's no multiplayer mode so I can laugh at this ''so bad it's good'' type of game together with my gaming buddies.

Before I talk about the characters abilities, I'll talk a little about the music.
I'm not as bothered by the crappy music as much as I am by the abysmal sound effects. There's some parts where the sound effects will get absolutely spammed and bleed your ears up in combination with a more energetic music. Sometimes I just stay still for a few moments in the game and do absolutely nothing just so I don't hear those terrible sounds anymore, other times I just mute the whole thing complete with the music. It doesn't help that the sfx are the same recycled and exact repeated sound effects with no diversity and no longer loops, it's a bunch of one second short sfxs which can be easily spammed ad infinitum to rape your ears. I can tolerate the ugly graphics, the mediocre music, the crappy gameplay, but not those fucking sound effects, drown them, kill them, set them ablaze, liquid nitrogen them.


Now I'll talk about each special ability of the ponies, namely the underpowered ones.

Lilly can spawn a flower while in mid-air. It's a pit fall saver and nothing more substantial than that.
It's not like the beanstalk from Mario. You can't climb down it or climb up, it doesn't sprout from the ground all the way up. You are also limited to just 1 per screen, which makes it completely useless compared to having 2 or more. It's not a turret or anything that attacks and gives health, it's as simplistic and anti-creative as it gets.

 Rainbow Dash of course gets her weaponized sonic rainboom attack. Why the hell not, just copy the same suicidal melee attack like everyone else. As a partner she will never aim it right and use it when you need it, namely at the mass of turrets in the last level of the everfree forest. Her range attack is her helicopter turtle Tank, just like Fluttershy attacking with her bunny. Spitfire is even weaker than Rainbow, Spit has the same dash ability, but absolutely no basic attack.

No that's not Lyra's attack.

As Pinkie Pie you get bombs which pop into balloons, I managed to spam them to get more balloons.
The balloons and confetti don't do anything, you can't jump on the balloons like platforms and they don't even grab the hard-to-reach apples, bits, coins, though I do remember you could do that... maybe it was in Magic Shards's updated version. Same story with Surprise, she throws birthday gifts and teddy bears, rubix cubes and other junk popping out.

What's her name throws out wheels which leave flames on the ground and What's her name #2 just throws dusts of clouds at her enemies and nothing more. He didn't decide to give Cloud Chaser/Storm Chaser anything based on her star cutie mark.

Carrot Top fittingly throws tiny carrots and has no other abilities. Though her jumps are very wide, she has much longer leaps than the other earth ponies.

 

There's a few melee characters in the game, so if you want some added challenge then use Dr Whoof, Daring Do and this white pegasus... I'll tell you how to get him in the next picture.

Scroll down past the ''Back'' option and to the bottom you'll find a selection of OC ponies.
Goddamn fuck his name. Also might be worth noting now. To unlock Princess Luna go to the Pass and type '' the fun has been doubled '' no caps lock, all spaces between words.

Raindrops uses small circle clouds and her special attack is a rain cloud which runs forth in a straight line and drops damaging rain on enemies. And for some reason Berry Punch turns into Twilight when she jumps.

Flitter has these tiny 5-way fragments as attack and nothing more. I think they're paper butterflies or something, maybe moths. Fire Fly has some blue rotating circles which go in weird directions after launched and her special ability is a super jump. Ah they're suppose to be white dragonflies just like her cutie mark.

Blossomforth is kinda interesting. She has no range or melee attack, instead she can curl up like a ball and bounce into enemies to deal damage. Like a ball... well most of the time.
 By the way in Sweet Apple Acres you can attack the trees to make the apples fall. It works good with Applejack's attack.

These two have some decent abilities. Dr Whooves has both a melee and range attack apparently, his yellow lazer cripples an enemy allowing him to finish it off with his sonic screwdriver attack. Though you can still receive damage by bumping into the enemy while it's stunned.
Nurse Redheart deals a fast grey projectile attack and gives back health to you. Useful as a partner in impossible mode when there's no health power-ups.
That's about all. The rest are just long-range projectile based and aren't worth mentioning.

*whipcrack*

Now I'll talk about the other various elements and most of the content of the game, including some of the secrets in it.

I never understood what was up with these glyphs, they aren't passwords for the secret characters because in the new version you unlock Luna and the others via secret stages or secret areas.

You can farm on this boss stage quite a lot.

Around the middle of the level there's a checkpoint full of walking corn enemies. x22 combos are easy to keep up and when you reach over x18 then you get 1 million for every enemy killed. It makes for a easy way to rack up points to 100 million. There was this competition on the Darkera Studios website where the highest ranked player would get his own oc pony in the game. I would have added a griffon with a shield, but that's me.

Though do take note of the framerate. This lava stage has that heat effect which severely lowers down the performance rate. If your game worked just fine at 60fps then expect a huge decrease in any lava stage that contains a high number of enemies. So at stage-6 Badlands prepare to toast your PC. You can try to remove all the effects in the options menu, but it will not work. It 's a very poorly optimized game as I said before.

You cannot enter any of the buildings, not even the landmark ones which have their own unique designs. Considering the game always has to center view; to scroll all the way over to the last checkpoint or door you went through I'd say he can't even add it, not that Game Maker would be that limited, but he just sucks at programming it. For fucks sake Super Mario Bros already made the circle loop levels work seamlessly in castle levels 6 and 7 along with the physics, and that was NES era.
Speaking of Mario...

Oh yeah that little... secret. You access it by flying with the pink balloon to the bottom left corner of the map and after landing you search around the small area to the bottom right. The mushroom gives health and 500 points, the 1Up green mushroom gives points, the super star doesn't give invincibility but gives points, there is no fire flower here. You can't projectile attack the goombas, but you can jump on their heads as intended. The turtle shells also work. Unfortunately the green pipes to the underground coin stage don't work. The flag pole and the castle fireworks don't work.

Stage 2-2 in the Everfree when you go left of the spawning area and fall through.
It's the song theme for New York city, but with the lyrics obviously changed to Equestria.
And of course the song doesn't stop after you go outside the area, not till the song is over. Glitchy ass audio. Whoever sang this must of first went his voice through a synthetizer to sound so annoying.

Jeez.. subtle. Could you perhaps write in big bold red letters ''Get Silver Key to open'' in your next version?

This white blur and stupid beeping sound will always stay true when you're low on health. It works wonders when you're in a dark area, as in it looks like a flock of pigeons took a collective crap on your screen and you went blind and got enlightened to stop playing this shitty game.

Time for some spooky creepypasta. Let me just cook up that pasta.

He tried to make the mini-boss stage more atmospheric and moody so he added a bit of an introduction before meeting the mini-boss.
Just add some spiders you can step on, some cobwebs and you're done. But oh no the big fat faggot thought it would be a great idea to add low lightning effects, to make it look all dark and spookier.
Surely he doesn't expect you to fight the boss in this darkness...

 

Nah, he just expects you to fight in an even darker place than before.

Now this boss mostly stays up on his cobweb and shoots at you from above, and considering you can only attack horizontally then I'd say you're gonna retry this boss quite a bit. Luckily Luna has 8 jumps and a very powerful attack which turns enemies purple.

Would have been a good boss battle if he just made the arena bigger and let you climb up on the cobwebs. In the first demo there is no dark effect, especially not this intensity of dark.

And of course if he used the effect once why not use it twice in an extremely large fucking level with far too many secrets to count.

If you want to access Froggy Bottom Bog(water level) then you need to go bottom, go past the checkpoint, past the trampoline and the spider, you need to jump through the wall. It's a real ass move to make the secrets hidden in walls which look exactly the same as every other wall.

The golden key to Froggy Bottom.

Ah yes froggy bottom bog, aka the swamp. It's a purely designed water level and as I've told you before, you can't jump out of the water.

How the hell do you expect me to get up there? I can only jump once, I'm surprised the game even lets me jump once, if I couldn't I wouldn't be able to get out of the water and onto land, then again at the edge of each water section the creator added trampolines to get me out of the water without complications.

If there's no ground to land on then you just fall down to your doom. Great design choice am I rite?

Oh those large emerald-like gems stolen from Sonic, are the Crown Jewels, they unlock characters, remove boulder blockades, secret stages. In demo 1 you need them to access Cloudsdale and Whitetail Woods.

Here's one of the cases where you can get stuck, as Dashie just loves being our example, look at that shitty pixelated face and tell me she doesn't love it. If you fall in that hole then your one jump won't be enough to get you out of there, you'll have to press Esc to return to the world map or plummet down to your death. What a cock tease to get stuck there right next to the level's exit.

So that's Froggy Bottom... that one fucking level which some people took hours to access. Pretty boring and shitty for such a hard to reach secret level. There's no hydra, the level design is straight as a linear flat arrow, the swamp is just a murky water with no quicksand design, overall it's shit. No new enemies, no bridge, no atmosphere, no secrets. All that work and nothing to pay for. Ponyvania had a much more satisfying swamp level.

See those yellow petals at the top-right on the user interface? Yeah those are petals and a sun flower.
Supposedly every single level has it's own mini-game, but I'm too lazy to find out if that's true.

After stage 7 Canterlot he'll add an extra stage 8, The Crystal Empire which will supposedly appear in the north center part of the map after beating the game. I think you'll need all the crown jewels collected to access that last stage. Don't expect any refreshing level design or anything new though.


So that's Clockwork Stallions. It's not as tedious, limited and hard as say Action52 Cheetahmen and Magic Shards, but it's still just as badly designed, boring and unsatisfactory. Playing a few levels of it is enough to give you the entire gist of the game without needing to play stage 2 to know it's the same shit.
CS is just a thick coat of paint over MS to try and hide the flaws. Clockwork Stallions is the sequel to Magic Shards. Though in MS you can't directly attack the bosses, you have to jump on their sphere projectiles and bounce it back into them, they each take about 12 hits. CS is overall easier, plus it's bigger, while MS only has 4 small stages. Unfortunately it's still pretty much the same shit.

Overall playing Clockwork Stallions is like taking a dog for a walk, an anorexic hyperactive chihuahua which jumps out of the purse, runs at 80miles an hour and constantly barks while it shits all over the streets, skullfucks people and does this all while having spasm attacks every 5 minutes. It would be a miracle if this game gained sentient life and put itself out of it's misery. Yeah the game turns into a virus which spreads on the internet and deletes every downloadable instance clockwork stallions and also deletes system32 so it may never be recovered and played again.
It can be funny to play for the first 1 hour, but like I said before it's not a game I'd willingly return to.
I give it a nice 3/10 which is a lot, considering Magic Shards I gave it -6/10, yeah that's right I use negative numbers to rate things.

Thank you for reading and goodnight everybody.