Putty Squad (PS4)

Putty Squad on PS4 is an odd sort of comeback story. The 90s platforming game Putty, also known as Super Putty, didn’t leave a huge splash, but it was at least successful enough that a sequel went into development. Slated to release for Amiga, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo in 1994, the game was sent out for review and received high praise, only for the game to never come to two of those platforms and only receive its Super Nintendo release in Europe. It could have been relegated to history as a European SNES exclusive that again didn’t leave a huge splash, but come 2014, a remake of the game would hit multiple consoles and even receive a physical release. The remake was more of a touch-up which made it even odder it wasn’t just a quick and simple digital release, but while this interesting show of faith from the the game’s creator System 3 did finally help the rest of the world easily play it, it did remove some of the mystique and leave us with a platformer that feels like it’s just a bit more of what the original Putty provided.

Putty Squad doesn’t come out and say what its big adventure is all about save that you’ll be playing as the blue amorphous blob known as Putty as he tries to save all the red putties that have been captured. Keeping in touch with the classic Amiga visual style of environments with incredibly busy visuals and unusual choices for what you face, this quest takes you through places that sound like they’d line up with real world environments like Middle Eastern cities and the snowy rooftops of London but the game world has a plastic look that makes the cats dressed in army gear and the bouncing carrots with sunglasses feel at home in a world that almost feels like a cobbled together playset.  While many locations are just a visual backdrop that might influence the appearance of certain enemies like the levitating swamis others do get more involved in altering the way you explore, the underwater levels having enemies who more freely move around to make them more dangerous than the land-based levels.

The Putty you play as is a fairly capable little character though and his durability has definitely been enhanced from the first game. A level timer exists but might as well not and the Putty can take quite a bit of punishment before perishing, although he does carry his life to the next level so frequently finding food is still necessary as later levels aren’t afraid to throw things at you before you’ve even found where your small blue orb has appeared in the visual noise. Putty Squad’s levels can be explored in every direction and the red putties you’re looking for can be found all about, and to help with exploration that is often as much upwards as outwards, Putty can inflate and float up without any real limits. He can’t attack while inflated, but it’s not too hard to cross most levels in a jiffy. The most dangerous thing in Putty Squad actually proves to be levels with instant death drops that the inflation power thankfully lets you avoid well enough, and while there are things roller coaster cats that can kill you instantly, you can always just quickly pause, exit the level, and pop back in to avoid losing a life. Since levels reward you with a nice star for beating them without dying you can game it this way, although there are little penalties that impact Putty’s other major power.

Putty can absorb things he finds in levels by standing in front of them and flattening himself. This is how he rescues other putties, picks up food for healing, and arms himself. Putty packs a small punch to start, but as you explore levels, floating stars can be collected to upgrade his attack to things like an electric poke or the powerful decoy launch that sends silver putties moving as far as their little legs will take them. The decoys deplete your star power and levels have a finite amount of yellow stars to collect to earn another star on the level completion screen should you find them all, but enemies also confusingly can drop them if killed certain ways so you can at least buff up your attack even if you’ve cleared out the level’s normal offerings. These aren’t the things Putty arms himself with through absorption though, as instead in levels you’ll sometimes find power-ups and items Putty can use that he will lose if you exit the level with the death avoidance trick. Red putties are often kept behind small bunkers you’ll need to bomb and you can usually count on Nitro bombs to be laying around in any level, but some stages do get a bit stingy to test you. You can carry Nitro over from other levels, and if you absorb the rocket-firing robots you can also briefly transform into them as another way to blow stuff up. Other items like calling in Uncle Ted to play some distracting music, a shield and disguise that both make you untouchable to enemies for a bit, and a rocket you can ride around and bomb levels with (sometimes as the only way to clear them) won’t carry with you between levels, but they do feel like they are quite useful or at least little helpful tools you might as well whip out when you have them. The only real dud in the item offerings is one that calls in a cat that you can knock down to bounce off of… when inflation already allows you to easily reach anywhere you want to go.

Putty Squad’s range of abilities and wacky worlds do feel a good fit for bite-sized exploration-focused levels and there are levels with some creative layouts, but other times so much is being thrown together without much thought of whether it feels cohesive that the levels start to run together. There are secret levels that require finding hidden doors in regular levels, these bonus stages often pretty tiny and more focused on where you’ll be heading and what dangers you face, but their simplicity also make them a bit too easy to really stand above the messy normal stages. A few little messy elements exist elsewhere, the map shows branches off levels with secret stages in them but World 7’s seem to mix up which levels go where and sometimes the game’s main Marathon mode won’t let you go back to previous levels but after turning the game off and on you can then pick any to replay. Later levels even seem unsure how many yellow stars and red putties they have, opening the exit or giving the message you found all of them before you’ve actually grabbed everything.

Putty Squad does have a challenge mode that does sound like it could be an interesting way to energize the often wide and a bit confusing level designs, but the challenges each level are given are fairly plain. They will be things like defeating every army cat you find when you’d probably be doing that already if you’re interested in earning a level’s green star for hitting the high score, they’ll ask you to complete a level quickly, or they’ll even just double dip by asking you to beat a level without dying just like one of the other reward stars. Some ideas are a touch better like not collecting healing items, but every level has quite a few challenges to beat if you want to earn the associated stickers for a sticker book. The sticker book has fun images and what amounts to concept art at times, and as fun as it can be to see a sticker of a Putty looking tough with dual pistols and bling, replaying every level with some rather plain extra objectives doesn’t feel like the extra oomph the game needs to overcome stage designs where you can feel like you’re just bumbling into the next thing to grab or beat rather than really working for your successes.

THE VERDICT: Putty Squad figured out how to improve on some of the original Putty’s flaws, but it throws too many of its ideas all about to form stages. Some of its more inspired stage designs crop up in the late game, but by then it’s spent a lot of time throwing together levels without much creative direction when it comes to the layout. It is still fun to see what strange and daffy characters stand in your path and the visual chaos is captivating in its own ways despite sometimes masking what is even tangible ground or an actual danger, and you do have the means to mess around and clear a level without too much fuss. Putty Squad’s strangeness certainly catches the player’s eye, but with so much of it just being ideas mushed together, it lacks the kind of exciting moments where a player’s wits or skills are tested that could have really left a mark on your memory.

And so, I give Putty Squad for PlayStation 4…

An OKAY rating. Being able to float around with ease and clear away most enemies without too much trouble means it’s pretty easy to press on through Putty Squad, but if its quirkiness isn’t capturing your interest, you’re not going to find its action all that engaging. The star system is perhaps too generous, the decoys really easy to use to wipe out enemies and even when you use them up, it’s not too hard to gather more stars or just make do with an electric poke that also either kills most things instantly or just in a few touches. The difficult levels like the underwater stages or forced flying segments are probably the most memorable because they aren’t just a wide space to putter your way through, but at least there is usually some enemy or concern in a level so you don’t just breeze on through without a little resistance. Putty Squad still feels like it too often lacks a strong direction and when it does concoct one like the roller coaster stage it is all too quick to toss it away and get back to wide busy levels. Items like the shield and disguise that make you basically invincible hardly hurt the experience because you’re not often in the kind of bind where being impervious to damage would be too much of a boon, the level layouts not entirely aimless but still things are placed without the degree of care needed to draw out the best of what they could have provided. There are spots where some effort was clearly made to combine complementary stage design and enemy abilities, but just like Putty himself, it can’t always stand out amidst the cluttered backdrop that is most of this game.

Putty Squad’s return from its rough launch back in 1994 didn’t quite provide us a lost gem, and the game that was praised to high heaven by magazines at the time turns out to be rather plain if you aren’t easily wowed by its visuals or ideas that aren’t that impressive without the sheen of being compared to simple contemporaries. Putty’s powers aren’t flawed though, some ideas do have a bit of direction, and overall it’s not awful poking around a stage just to see what you find in a little scavenger hunt, but the game would certainly be a more fascinating comeback story if its many wild sights also translated into the kind of entertaining activities that make a game worth remembering.