Crazy Stars: Sport Climbing

Genre: Arcade / Sports (Rock Climbing)

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Crazy Stars: Sport Climbing, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch, is an Arcade-style game focused on Rock Climbing as a sport. Specifically, the sort of rock climbing you might do at the gym. And if you’re expecting one of those harrowing, tense, strategic rock-climbing games that has become increasingly popular in recent years… yeah, no, this isn’t anything like that.

Instead, you’re button-mashing one button to climb up until your hand-holds change color and you have to swap to a different color on a different vertical slice up the climb you’re making, which you do by pressing a different button. Then, once you’ve done that, you go back to pressing the first button until you have to swap again. Press the wrong button and you fall and lose. That’s it. In other words, this is the sort of gameplay that you’d expect to find in a Mario Party minigame, and not an especially good one.

The presentation is okay, using colorful, cartoony 3D visuals that are severely lacking un personality in the manner you’d expect from mobile games, backed by energetic music that is extremely repetitive.

When it comes to the gameplay… oh, I pretty much already described it. Yeah, the game tries to add nuance by giving you upgrades that let you survive mistakes, and dropping rocks down the climb that you need to avoid hitting. But otherwise, this is pretty monotonous and you’ll bore of it quickly.

And here I was just about ready to end with a C- grade for this throwaway $2 game when I suddenly noticed that this isn’t a $2 game, it’s an $11 game that does that thing where it’s discounted once a month to $2 (or just above $2). No. Nuh-uh. Crazy Stars: Sport Climbing, I was being generous giving you a C- when I thought you were priced at $2, but you actually want to pretend you can wear the price of a big-boy game? Straight down to a D grade you go. And just be glad I don’t mark you down more than that.

tl;dr – Crazy Stars: Sport Climbing is an Arcade-style game focused on Rock Climbing as a Sport, with gameplay that amounts to button-mashing to climb, then pressing a button to “change lanes”, then button-mashing some more. The gameplay here is far too simple and repetitive to hold your interest for more than a few minutes, and the $11 price tag is an absurd joke that’s clearly trying to exploit the eShop by dropping down to $2 every month to trick people into thinking it’s a good deal. It isn’t. Do not buy this.

Grade: D

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