Crawl

Genre: Top-Down Action-RPG / Party Game

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Crawl is a game that blends a Top-Down Action-RPG with the Party Game genre, making for a fast-paced and hilarious asymmetrical competition where one player takes the role of a hero fighting through dungeons, and the other players take the role of ghosts haunting the environment, sending minions after the hero, and becoming monsters to attack the hero, all in the hopes of taking him down so they can become the hero in his stead, with the goal being to level up your hero and defeat the final boss before the others.

The game uses decent pixel art graphics with some nice animations that give the game a good amount of personality, and there’s a decent chiptune soundtrack. However, the one element of the presentation I really enjoy is how over-the-top certain elements are, such as the very arcadey way the screen lights up whenever one player dies and another takes over as the hero, or the delightful opening narration explaining how the game works.

The gameplay here feels a bit rudimentary – players in the role of the hero have a regular attack and a special move, each with a cooldown that’s a bit frustrating but keeps the action from devolving into a button-mashing fest. Ghosts have a bit more in the way of options, as they can drop minions after collecting enough pickups, they can possess inanimate objects, or they can use pentagram sigil to enter the physical realm as a monster, who then like the hero have a regular attack and a special move, each with a cooldown.

However, while the fundamentals here are pretty basic, the way they’ve been worked together is really ingenious. The hero earns experience for defeating monsters, which is needed to level up and exit the dungeon and, ideally, win. However, the more the hero levels up, the more “rage” the ghosts get, which can be used in-between floors of the dungeon to evolve their monsters into more powerful forms. What’s more, the longer the hero dawdles in a room and the more inanimate objects he destroys, the more ectoplasm appears, which can be collected by ghosts to summon the aforementioned supporting minions. As a result, the stronger the hero becomes, the closer he gets to winning but also the more powerful the opposition becomes. It makes for a really clever way to balance the game and ensure that the players that are behind have a leg up to get back in the thick of things.

There are other little clever elements as well – there are shop rooms where the hero can buy upgraded equipment, but the longer he spends considering what to buy, the more time the ghosts have to collect ectoplasm. And not only are the rooms randomized, but so too are the equipment in these shops, the monsters ghosts can summon, and the final boss (usually something with three parts, like three heads or three limbs) that the ghosts can possess independently. And the more players play the game, the more potential stuff they unlock for use in subsequent playthroughs.

There’s a lot of clever ideas going on here, but there are a few drawbacks. Players will find there’s a lot of trial and error to selecting their monster upgrades and hero equipment and figuring out how they work, at least as they play through the game normally. Thankfully, the game includes a Vault mode with challenges for each of these things so players can get a feel for them outside of competition with each other. However, there is another issue – some of the bosses here are damn difficult, and if the ghosts influencing the boss are even reasonably competent, they can seem virtually impossible to beat, which makes for a frustrating situation where the hero player beats out the competition, only to lose at the final part. And finally, while the Vault challenges are a nice task for a single player to aim to complete, it would have been nice if this game actually had a more fully-fledged campaign mode of some kind.

However, while there are some frustrations here, overall Crawl is a brilliant way of re-imagining the Action-RPG genre in the form of a Party Game, and players looking for something unique they can play to throw down in multiplayer will find Crawl to be a fantastic addition to their collection.

tl;dr – Crawl blends a Top-Down Action-RPG and a Party Game into a brilliant, original asymmetrical party game that makes for a fun and unique competition that has a clever approach to game balance. The game could have used a traditional campaign mode, and some of the bosses don’t feel as nicely balanced as the rest of the game, but overall this is a fantastic game that should make for a great time at parties.

Grade: B+

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