Tweet
Every now and then I meet a skeleton I really like. Crawl's bundle of bones is a case in point. He's slightly top-heavy, with broad shoulders and - unsurprisingly, really - a trim waist. He races about head thrust forward as if running into the wind, and once you level him up, he fires his arrows like he's laying down power chords. This guy's a rattly pleasure to fight alongside and a nagging pain to fight against - and that's Crawl for you, basically: a dungeon-diving spin on musical chairs that already feels more like a sport than a game. On screen, Crawl is beautiful, its fidgety, blown-up pixel art allowing for elegantly ragged swordsmen, brutish, ham-faced minotaurs, and a final boss who's a squidgy mass of fat tentacles undermined, alas, by his dangerously exposed brain. Animation here is a progression from one comic book pose to another.
On paper, it's equally lovely - a four-player competitive game where one happy fool gets to be the dungeon-raiding hero and the other three get to be the dungeon trying to do that hero in. Whenever the dungeon succeeds, the victor swaps places with the hero and the whole thing repeats. Fight your way up to level 10 and you get to open a portal to the final boss. That's it: a defiantly local-only multiplayer treat. Be warned: bots are available, but in a bickering, grief-centric design like this one, where's the joy in that?
Read more…
More...