Reverse Crawl

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Nerdook Bundle Vol. 1 along with Monster Slayers and Vertical Drop Heroes HD. It is also included in the Anti Hero Bundle along with Nefarious and Underhero, as well as Digerati Presents The Dungeon Crawl Vol. 1 along with Fall of Light: Darkest Edition, Skelly Selest, and Unexplored: Unlocked Edition.)

Reverse Crawl is a Turn-Based Strategy game that has you taking the role of a deceased king resurrected by his necromancer daughter to seek revenge on those who slew you by commanding a horde of undead minions.

This is a clever concept bolstered by an amusing tongue-in-cheek story. The visuals are nothing special or memorable, but they get the job done. Surprisingly, given the whimsy the rest of this game aims for, it features a pretty decent orchestral soundtrack.

As for the gameplay itself, players select units to deploy from a randomized selection that expands over time, with those units being randomized further by modifiers that change up their stats. Selecting their unit, they then deploy it to the game’s hex-based grid to battle, sending out a new unit only when the previous one is defeated.

I found the gameplay in this game to be decent, but overly simple and lacking in the sort of deep strategy I look for in this sort of game. Units have strengths and weaknesses that you need to weigh, but the combination of the random elements and the inability to deploy more than one group of units at a time really limits how much thought you can put into the battles.

Further limiting the battles is their turn-based nature, which works sorta’ like the Worms games – each side always gets an alternating turn unless they’ve run out of units that can still move. unfortunately, players don’t choose which unit will move in a given turn, which again cuts down on the game’s strategy.

I should mention that the Nintendo Switch version of the game features an exclusive 2-Player local competitive mode, but this is of course done with the same gameplay as the rest of the game, with similar results.

In the end, Reverse Crawl is a decent Strategy game with a cute story, but little else to set it apart. If you’re looking for a decent strategy game on the Switch, this works, but you have better options available to you.

tl;dr – Reverse Crawl is a Turn-Based Strategy game where you play a murdered king commanding a legion of undead to get revenge on the enemy who killed you. It has a nice whimsical plot, but the gameplay is not very compelling, with multiple design decisions that limit how strategic the player’s choices are. It’s okay, but not great.

Grade: C+

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