Mmmm? An indie title, delivering unique game mechanics in an arcade-like format with a retro style? Well, Super Crate Box is not the first nor, thankfully, the last. Indie games have often been somewhere along those lines, making ideas too wild for the general market become a reality, dressed up in old-school graphics and gameplay because the people involved don’t generally have access to a full art team. This isn’t a problem, of course – I love pixelmania as much as the next indie gamer 🙂
Super Crate Box started me off with mixed feelings towards it. On one hand, I’m still capped, and the 20 mb download seemed pretty hefty for a title that might last for about five minutes of entertainment. On the other hand, it was free and looked pretty neat and I’m always a sucker for fast paced action.
Boom. An hour later. I was due in to hand an assignment tomorrow, which I had barely started, but none of that mattered right now. Why? Because my high score was scraping rock bottom and I’d just unlocked the laser rifle. This was insane.
I mean, there’s something about repetitive gameplay that seems to suck people in (obviously what made Halo such a success ;)) but what I think it really is is creating a simple set of rules that allow for infinitely complex situations. Take Counter-Strike: Source. Do you think people would have gotten bored of cs_office by now if the same thing always happened? Of course! But every match is almost completely unique in the way it plays out, so CS is still one of the most played games on the planet. For a lot of other damn good reasons as well, of course.
Take other titles. Tetris, for example, and of course, Nintendo have been remaking the same Mario game for the last twenty years. The simpler a game, the more replayability it has, and the more replayability, the more people come back for. Hence my sudden addiction with Super Crate Box: You are given a handful of guns and an infinite amount of enemies. In a way, it reminded me of a deathmatch game, but in two dimensions, of course. Oh, and the speed! This is surely what made the last generation fall in love with the arcade. Quickly, quickly, dodge, jump, left, right, REACT! Your own reflexes are on the edge, and at the same time you have to think incredibly fast and make decisions within milliseconds. It simply could not get more intense, and I could only dream of the laughs you would get out of multiplayer, at least if it had it. It is fun in distilled form, somewhere between Serious Sam and Mario Bros, and I consider it a small gem.
But a rough one. There are faults, I’m afraid: For a game with pixel graphics and only three stages, it loads very slowly, and occasionally lags out on this (quite reasonable) machine. Nevertheless, I am a patient person, and I’m prepared to live with these. The second stage is also kind of a pain in the ass, and the laser rifle effects are a bit dodgy, but these are small niggles in what is otherwise a brilliant piece of addictive gameplay. Don’t play unless you have a few hours of free time. Or a biology class.
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Multiple Fractures 