Crawl Review

Like I do with many games, I first heard about Crawl through one of ProtonJon's livestreams. Jon frequently does variety streams where he plays a randomly selected game from his collection for around half an hour, and since his collection is massive, the chances of me seeing a game I've never even heard of before are quite high. One night, those chances introduced me to Crawl, and Jon showed me (well, his audience) just how cool the game is.

Developed by Powerhoof - a two man dev team - Crawl is an asymmetric multiplayer roguelike beat em' up game with bullet hell elements. Sounds crazy, right? Well, I expect its actually rather hard to imagine what the game is like given just those descriptors, so I'll try my best to explain in more detail. Basically, the game plays out like this: the players all start off as humans locked in a room, who must fight in a sudden-death battle to determine who the starting human will be. From there, the human player must try to survive as long as they can against the other players, who are all ghosts that can summon and posses monsters and activate traps in an attempt to kill the human. Whoever lands the killing blow on the living player steals their humanity and becomes the living player, while the now dead player becomes a ghost. Sound crazy now?

The goal of the living player is to collect EXP and purchase items to grow more powerful so that they are powerful enough to successfully kill the boss. The gameplay loop is effectively to fight monsters, find the shop, buy items, and survive to the next floor, repeating until someone levels up to level 10, at which point that player can make an attempt on the boss by finding and entering the portal that lies on each floor. Though, often it can be a better idea to wait until you think your equipment and stats are good enough to actually be able to kill the boss, rather than going straight there immediately after reaching level 10. On average, my victories happen when I'm around level 14.

All players are given three shared chances to kill the boss. Whoever fails to kill the boss for the third time is "consumed" by the boss, allowing it to roam free from the dungeon and wreak havoc. That player also has their profile deleted - going with the whole "consumed" thing - erasing their name and win-streak from the file select screen. When I heard about this feature, it made me hesitate to buy it, thinking that I could have my data erased, but that's not the case. All of your unlocks and other such achievements remain, so don't worry like I did.

It may sound like the living player always has the upper hand and thus whoever is the best at the game will always win, but that's not necessarily the case. The living player gets experience by killing monsters, sure, but when one of the other players levels up, all other players are rewarded with Wrath. After each floor, players can upgrade their monsters by spending Wrath. Thus, the stronger one player gets, the stronger the other players' monsters get. Effectively, the more time a player spends alive, the less Wrath they get. In addition, ghost players are rewarded with Gold after each battle based on how much damage they dealt to the player, so in order to afford better items when you're alive, you need to do well when you're dead. In an almost beautiful way, the more skilled a player is, the more they need to rely on that skill to stay ahead.

Though Crawl is clearly multiplayer focused, it's very possible to enjoy the game on your own via matches against the AI. It's more or less the exact same experience just with AI driven opponents. The intelligence of the AI has three settings - easy, normal, and hard - you can play with just one opponent or a full game against three, and the difficulty curve is smooth thanks to the aforementioned Wrath and Gold mechanics, so it's very easy to find a comfortable level challenge while playing alone. Though, admittedly, the AI isn't perfect, so you're better off playing against humans. The AI does well enough to make the game engaging most of the time, but it can sometimes slow the game down, and since they're not real people, you don't have the option to ask them to hurry up.

Now, let's talk about some subjective elements of the game real quick. I normally don't do this, but in this case, I think it's warranted. Crawl sports a (intentionally) glitchy old-school arcade aesthetic, and it's really solid. Every bit of the game works in favor of this theme to really sell it. The graphics, while not in the range of my personal tastes, is undeniably fantastic spritework. Sometimes game developers choose to go with a pixelated graphic style out of laziness or cheapness, but this is clearly not the case for Crawl. The sprites are masterfully done, making good use of every single pixel on screen. The music is also really good, with mostly 8-bit-esq synth sounds mixing with more symphonic-sounding instruments to set whatever tone the game demands.

For me, the most appealing element of Crawl is its awesome beast designs. As previously mentioned, players can summon monsters in attempt to kill the living player, which can be upgraded by spending Wrath at the end of each floor. Monsters start off small and weak, but steadily grow into more powerful incarnations as Wrath is spent on them. While monsters don't always evolve into a stronger version of its previous form, they often become something related to its previous form, like how a spider can become a scorpion. This whole concept and execution of evolving monsters throughout the game is really awesome to me.

Though they don't evolve, the bosses also have great designs. Similarly to regular monsters, bosses are controlled by the dead players in an attempt to kill the living player. Each player gets to control a different part of the boss. For example, the hydra Ghidraak has three heads, each of which can be controlled by dead players to attack the living player with elemental breaths. Disappointingly, there are only three bosses for the entire game, which can make repeat playthroughs feel more repetitious than they should, especially given the game's roguelike nature. I would say that four or five bosses would've been a more comfortable number to have. As a small bit of insult to injury, you can't skip boss intro cutscenes, which makes the repetition of the encounter slightly more apparent.

That said, I think Crawl deserves a full 5 out of 5. Considering that the game was made by just two people, I'm willing to forgive the AI's quirks and the amount of bosses. Crawl is a really rad game in both concept and execution, and you should definitely pick the game up if it sounds like something you can enjoy on your own or if you have a few friends who you know would play it with you.

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Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawl_(video_game)