rawl's graphics, music, VO, intro and premise, everything about this game slaps soooo hard. Easily one of the best introduction to a game I've ever seen. From the gorgeous pixel art, to the ominous deep voice of the narrator, to the perfect way to tutorial a game. Everything about it (and the game I would later find out) is 10/10. Crawl is a dungeon crawling roguelite with couch coop, hence the name. The game introduces as to four characters, wrought with insanity and fed up with the dungeon, and only one can live. The survivor becomes the hero and the other three the spectres. As you move through the level the spectres must kill the hero by using traps, slimes and summoning demons via pentagrams. The hero must slay through the dungeon, levelling up with each skull as they do, before finally reach level 10 and are able to face their boss. If they slay the boss they're victorious and escape a legend. If they fail the spectres get another turn and eventually the monstrosity is unleashed.
The game has couch co-op which I'll certainly be playing in the future but the AI is no slouch and hard to beat. I really struggled at first on normal difficulty that I had to put it down to easy. It can be very hard to get that finally strike on the hero, and assume control, and the AI are pretty good at the coup de grace. The game has a perfectly system of heroes get XP, levelling hero gives enemies wrath so they can evolve and catch up, and doing more damage on a hero gets gold allowing you to buy the best weapons even if you do get kill stolen (ughh this can be infuriating in such a good way). Once ready the hero travels through a slick portal animation to face the boss and the other 3 players must control the boss together to defeat the hero. A viable tactic would be to sit as a monster most the game, wrack up gold and wrath, them swoop in mid to late game and buy everything to power level you way to the top. But you'd also risk the RNG not going your way and you want have as much opportunity to buy potions, the main source of stat increase and it's limited to two per level. You might also struggle to get the last hit in towards the end. So there's some interesting risk-reward dynamics here. The meta game is also really cool where you unlock new weapons, items, traps and most importantly monster evolutions. But the extra cool part is choosing a monster god to worship which gives a variety of perks or starting bonuses. It has a very eldritch and Victorian era horror element to it.
 |  |
Beyond the gameplay the pixel art and animation is the star of the show and has soooo much character. From the individual "gobliny" enemies and how they evolve into absolute monsters to the final boss and their terrifying "RAWR!". Every aspect of them is animated so well, whether it be the Aztec statue with its voodoo priest. The tentacle bubble monster spitting venom and explosive goblets you can knock back into its mouth to attack it's bubble brain. Or the three headed hydra that is awoken by a wannabe adventure who quick realises his mistake and hides in the corner occasionally heals you. Even the smaller details like effects from monster abilities, or when you choose to evolve a monster with the two options sitting in the dual palms of your monster god, blessings upon you, or the win screen showing the victorious hero escaping the dungeon or the envious spirits successful in unleashing the beast. Everything about this game is charming and satisfying to play and I'll certainly be returning to play it with a few extra friends.
 |  |
No comments:
Post a Comment