Official Score
Overall - 40%
40%
Climb With Wheelbarrow has an interesting premise, but the controls and camera are simply not up to the task. Expect a healthy dose of frustration should you want to make the climb.
Using a wheelbarrow is cumbersome enough as it is, but this awkward tool becomes that much worse when you’re climbing high in the sky, carrying a heavy load along the way. Pickle Drugs’ appropriately titled Climb With Wheelbarrow gives players a challenging task to overcome – is this ascent worth the trouble?
Climb With Wheelbarrow Review
As a blue man with an orange cap, the goal of this title is a simple one: follow a winding path upwards with your wheelbarrow, don’t fall down, and don’t lose your cargo of bricks. Sounds simple, right?
However, anybody who has ever done serious yardwork realizes that the handling on one of these bad boys is less than ideal. The turn radius of your tool is less than ideal, and though players can bend the laws of physics and game design with some of these maneuvers, players will need all the help they can get. Rather than go with a straightforward path, the road to victory is instead paved with traffic lights, brooms, pallets, oars, and the narrow part of doors.
This quickly proves to be a recipe for disaster. Though players can restart at any checkpoint with a press of the “R” button, this proves to be far more challenging than it has any right to be. To add insult to injury, some areas require sharp turns at near-impossible angles, while others require the use of the Shift key for an additional boost.
Unfortunately, the control scheme found in Climb With Wheelbarrow is just not made for the job. Players will make use of the WASD keys, but the title is in desperate need of an analog stick and a second stick for the camera. There are far too many times where players have a poor vantage point, or simply cannot see where they need to go. It’s a constant fight with the camera, and it proves to be far more frustrating than fun.
Things get that much harder with some of the additional challenges the game likes to throw at the player. On random occasions, the character will feel dizzy, which messes with your vantage point. In a twist of the knife, any dropped brick adds an extra seven seconds of time to your overall ranking. Though there is a way to beat the game through trial and error, this steady climb to the top borders on Sisyphean.
One players do finally complete the title, there’s not much else to keep players coming back. For the especially brave, there are achievements for those that complete the game under a certain time, and a leaderboard also exists for those who have overcome every last quirk of the title.
Climb With Wheelbarrow has an interesting premise, but the controls and camera are simply not up to the task. Expect a healthy dose of frustration should you want to make the climb.
