Have you ever found your Xbox One library to be lacking local multiplayer games? Have you ever wanted to engage in chaotic sports mayhem, with your closest friends yelling and screaming around you? Then ClusterPuck 99 may be a good fit for you.
ClusterPuck 99 is a simple game at heart, but it has the potential to turn a boring party into a lot of fun for short bursts of time. It is loosely based on the principles of ice hockey, with two teams attempting to pass a puck along a map in order to score into the enemy team’s goal. Each player embodies a small, circular mallet that glides across the map smoothly, accelerating slightly as it moves along. The idea is to attach one’s mallet to the puck and then pass to a teammate or shoot for the goal. The concept is nice, but major flaws in the gameplay mechanic make themselves known fairly early on.
First off, ClusterPuck 99 is impossible to play with two people. As soon as one player comes into possession of the puck, it is a trivial task to quite literally walk the puck into the goal. Fair enough. The game isn’t meant for two players anyway. Therefore I decided to test and see how reliable the AI are, that way I could still enjoy the game without being limited by a lack of friends. Unfortunately, the AI are about as basic as you can get.
One might think that ClusterPuck99 would promote teamwork and tactics in order to score, being a sports game, but alas, it does not. As soon as one AI comes into contact with the puck, it will waltz right into the goal, still attached to the puck, thus scoring. It will not pass the puck. It will not attempt to coordinate, even with friendly AI. It will make a beeline for the goal and is guaranteed to do so properly. The AI can be adjusted to Easy, Medium, or Hard, but these difficulty levels only seem to speedup or slow down the AI, without affecting their actual behavior. Also, on harder maps with obstacles, real players must carefully shimmy in between spikes and pitfalls, but the AI will track the path perfectly, pushing all real players into a spike or off the map, which causes a 5 second cooldown before a respawn is available.
The more AI you add, the more chaotic the game will become, but not in a good way. Multiple AI characters will follow each other in a “follow the leader” type line. The only way that this can be seen as a plus is if you consider the AI so unintelligent that you cannot help but laugh at them. In short, the AI is utterly useless.
With a group of six to eight real people, ClusterPuck 99 becomes a more entertaining experience, but it suffers from claustrophobic arenas that don’t allow for any teamwork. It becomes slightly harder to walk straight into the goal with the puck, which is a good thing, but it also becomes more challenging to make a clean pass to a teammate. Because of this, no real strategy is involved. The best tactic is to rush the puck and hope that you can hit it towards the goal. This is still fun, but it certainly removes all possibility of calling ClusterPuck 99 competitive. The game changes from a variation on ice hockey into a variation of some sort of “bumper car soccer.”
We frequently found ourselves in a large clump, trying to figure out where the puck even was. This was especially bad because each team is a certain color, so all members of the purple team are the same exact shade of purple, and it was hard to tell my own character apart from my friends’ characters. You can assign a name to your character, but I found the thin white font hard to read, especially while moving about so frantically. I think that a good way to fix the issue of too few spaced out players versus too many clustered players would be to redesign the arenas. More spread out arenas might solve some of these issues. My personal favorite map, called “Boring”, is just a flat space with two goals on either side. I found “Boring” far more exciting than the winding narrow paths of the more complex levels. Simple is good. Besides, you know there’s an issue when you have to focus on how to stay on the map more so than how to score a goal.
Luckily, ClusterPuck 99 comes equipped with an asset that will allow you to solve this problem yourself, at least to some extent. A very detailed level editor comes with the game, and it seems to be quite fun if you’re into that kind of thing. I personally don’t have the patience to design a level myself, but for some people that is a major plus. It was quite simple to construct a layout and to test it.
I really enjoyed the intense electronic beats that play during the menus and the matches, and I think that they add to the atmosphere of the game. The ability to change team colors and swap rosters around in between matches was also extremely efficient and quick to do.
Overall I think that ClusterPuck 99 has some flaws. It’s unplayable with less than four people total, but with lots of players on the right maps, it’s fun to play, even if it is so chaotic that you can’t always tell your character apart from everyone else’s. As long as you can gather together the people and the controllers, (remember, there is no online play! Local multiplayer only!) then I would recommend picking this up! You’ll get thirty minutes to an hour of fun and laughs with your friends per special occasion.
ClusterPuck99 is above average. I recommend purchasing for ten dollars if possible. We give ClusterPuck99 a 6.5/10. Just as long as you have friends to play with.
Tristan was a regular ICXM contributor between 2015–2017, publishing 51 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @tbogost.