cre: Review: Fight Crab
Nyarg! Crab battle!
I like crabs. Do you like crabs? I keep a small group of hermit crabs as pets, one has been with me for over a decade now. So my first question on entering fight the crab was, “can I play as a hermit crab?”
The answer is no, unfortunately, but you do have the option of piloting a Coconut Crab, which is basically a giant hermit crab. They grow up like hermit crabs – hiding their soft, delicious bottoms in gastropod shells – but eventually get too big and difficult to use, so they go naked. It is the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world and is known to be mischievous.
That’s probably the most intellectual thing I’ll say in this whole review, because fight the crab is an immensely dumb game, and I say that as lovingly as possible.
fight the crab (computer, switch [reviewed])
Developer: Calappa Games
Publisher: Playism, Mastiff
Released: July 29, 2020 (PC), September 15, 2020 (Switch)
MSRP: $19.99
do you like to goat simulator? Do you remember Road rash 64? Did you get your doctorate in surgeon simulator? These are all really dumb games that you’ll probably enjoy a lot more if you don’t take them very seriously. Jump off this building. I mentioned pork jam with a banana. Open that rib cage with an alarm clock. Have a little fun!
fight the crab closely follows this philosophy. It seems that every mechanic was offered with the qualifier “Wouldn’t it be funny if…”
It’s a game that is exactly what it says on the box. You choose from a growing assortment of shellfish, then fight your way to victory. Or maybe your claws aren’t enough for you. There is also a huge selection of weapons to choose from. Everything from sai to lightsaber. Choose your poison, then battle it out in a number of equally bizarre environments like a medieval dining room, a supermarket display, or a table in a Chinese restaurant.
There are actually a lot of things to choose from. There are 23 types of crabs ranging from adorable little snappers to Lovecraftian horrors from the nightmarish town of R’lyeh. If you face them in the main campaign, you can rest assured that you’ll be able to pilot their grumpy shells, which include all the big bosses. Size isn’t always an advantage, so you may need to experiment to determine which shellfish is right for you.
Once you’ve chosen your claws and loaded them with deadly weapons, it’s time to get dirty with fight the crabis a clunky, clunky combat system. SoulCalibur, it’s not. Each stick controls one of your claw arms, the triggers are for pinching and punching, and the shoulder buttons are for grabbing and blocking. You move by pressing a direction on the d-pad, which sends your crab scuttling indefinitely until you tell it to stop. Or you can play around with the motion controls using the Joy-Cons if you hate your arms.
Simple enough, right? He is! fight the crab is very pick-up-and-play, as there’s very little finesse needed with the controls. Crabs move as if submerged in molasses, so there is buoyancy in all their actions, giving you the flexibility to decide whether to go on the offensive or bombard. Or you can just set your crab to move forward and start wiggling; it works surprisingly well too.
Which isn’t to say there isn’t strategy involved here. Most of my online battles have resulted in my exoskeleton being handed to me by people who have mastered the art of motorized scootering or know how to combine a jet engine with a katana. There is a lot of experimentation to be done.
Perhaps because the main event here is watching the crab fights, the campaign weighs a bit. There are six stages and a trio of additional challenges. Stages can be tackled at various difficulties, adding a bit of replay value, but to get through them once you won’t need to reconfigure your timeline. Throughout the campaign you can buy more weapons and upgrade your favorite crabs, although the upgrade system seems a bit unimportant as I never noticed a difference no matter how many points that I have piled up in each category.
One feature I liked is that most campaign levels can be played co-op after a certain point. I had my first chance to play fight the crab the same day my husband had a brutal experience at work. A little saltwater brutality was just the ticket to cheer him up.
It’s a very clunky game, and maybe that’s due to its design. Each crab takes some getting used to, featuring not only different weights, sizes, and speeds, but also different claw configurations. It’s much easier to catch another crab with the fiddler’s large claw than with the coconut crab’s upside-down claws. Likewise, don’t expect to hit anything by sticking a double-barreled shotgun in the hands of a longarm crab. These flexible appendages can barely resist the rebound.
To win a fight, you have to knock another crab onto its back, and the physics behind that aren’t easy to figure out. Sometimes you can pinch your enemy’s face until they turn around, other times you can just fall on them, sometimes the physics mess up and launch your prey several feet into the air, and sometimes it just refuses to rock like some kind of bombed Weeble. Getting up can be just as unreliable. The game tells you to hit wildly to turn around, but if that has any effect I haven’t experienced it.
If you are going to take this game seriously, you are going to suffer from rage. Facets are wonky, others are unreliable. The outcome of the match can be decided by who is lucky with physics. Skill certainly plays a role, no doubt, but it can easily be overshadowed by misfortune.
Likewise, the game is a bit messy from a technical point of view. It runs well, the graphics are good, and I’ve never had a problem with the netcode, although I’ve mostly played against Japanese people. The soundtrack is fun, but maybe a bit repetitive. Its worst sin is that the user interface is absolutely horrible. It does the job, but not without confusion and ugliness.
If you’re willing to put your brains aside and settle for crunchy bumps, you can count on having a good time. There’s a lot to be said for the spectacle of marine insects thrown with medieval weapons. It manages to keep things fresh by putting you in absolutely bizarre situations, and you’ll never forget the first time a lobster attacks you with a gun. On the other hand, this kind of silly fun is always fleeting. You probably won’t spend a lot of time mastering the art of the pinch of death, and once the novelty wears off, you’ll probably molt your old shell and move on.
[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]
source: gameplaytrick.com -
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