Recent reviews by Crashtroid

My inner child is going ballistic over this game

Full review inbound but in my first few moments with this game I have fallen entirely in love with the game's sense of humour, movement, spectacle and ESPECIALLY sound design and music. This is the game I've been waiting for since Crash 2 came out in 1997.

The reason I love this game so much is because the new controls have given me the ability to fully involve myself with the game's mechanics and decision making.

Modern controls have allowed me to focus on the mechanics of the game, and make decisions much quicker compared to SFV and SFxTK, which I used to play. I would always struggle with the execution and it never felt great to play against anyone, even when I'd win since I could only reliably execute half of my character's moveset and I would feel like a spammer.

Now I can actually attempt to understand what OKI, DPs, block strings, frame traps, etc are and implement that knowledge into each match I play, making decisions that end up improving the outcomes. I might not be great, but the modern control scheme takes some of the cognitive load off so I have the space to learn.

Visuals are great, sound design hits, music is solid overall, and the mode offerings are great! Microtransactions for cosmetics and characters hurts a lot, but I'm more willing to shell out for characters knowing they also have voice acting, animation work, story mode inclusions, etc.

Online play is really stable and I only feel a problem when someone's running internet that cuts out their discord calls every 6 seconds, every other connection has been solid as can be!

SF6 overall has been the first time I really feel like I can participate in a fighting game community meaningfully and I value that tremendously. Alongside a striking visual style and a great online experience, I don't really get tired of playing! Totally worth trying no matter where you are in your fighting game level of experience.

crab game 2 goes crazy dawg

This is absolutely peak multiplayer in terms of creating stories to tell. The variables in player behaviour and monster variety, the balance between horror and comedy, and the minimalist presentation in terms of lore and tutorial all lend themselves amazingly to the ability to recount the tales of your tomfoolery to others. Never have I booted this game up and not had an amazing gameplay clip to share, story to tell or memory to share with friends.

Gotta be my favourite release of 2023, and you know there were some amazing games that year!

The music is PHENOMENAL, Noisecream really made an OST of exclusively bangers. Definitely listen to their work both from roboquest and from their back catalogue! Can't recommend it enough. Favourite track is probably "Entropy".

The movement and gunplay is fantastic, I find myself entering a "flow state" very easily regardless of what weapon or build I have at the time. The abilities, weapons, movement and especially the headbonking mechanic (think bouncing off a goomba) all meld together to where I feel like I don't have to even think about how I traverse or what target I prioritise, my brain and body just somehow know. Sound design on the guns and abilities is also great, meaning I can focus a lot on the action and know when abilities have recharged, when I killed an enemy with a critical hit, etc. If I could ask for anything more on the sound design, it'd just be a more distinct sound for your main ability so when it recharges it cuts through the rest of the audio to make sure you can hear it well, sometimes I can't hear the sound effect all that well and forget my ability is up.

The visuals are great! I love the comic book style, the silhouettes are great for an action game, the onomatopoeia is a FANTASTIC touch, and animations are great all around! I prefer more stylized games to realism, so roboquest is exactly the kind of commitment to a striking style that I want in a game.

Runs take about 35-50 minutes, 25 if you're really blazing through, which I found to be perfect! Although I am hoping there will be an update with some kind of post-final boss extension (a la voidling in risk of rain 2) so I can really test a build against an unreasonably hard challenge if it just blasted through the game. I find there's few builds in this game that allow me to effortlessly clean house, but it would be cool to have a fight tough enough to see how far they can really get pushed.

And on the topic of builds, I love the perk system in this game! There's a few basic stat boost perks, and then you can collect up to 4 main perks, each having 2 sub perks. Most of the time I found that choosing my 4 main perks and maxing out on sub perks before picking up stat boosts was the way to go, but I'm starting to experiment with leaving some sub perks behind to focus on stat buffs. Hopefully either new skills are introduced or more synergies will be added later, excited to see how they develop :)

Overall Roboquest is absolutely a buy, deluxe edition and all, it's the most fun I've had with a roguelike since Risk of Rain 2! Lovely devs, super well thought out gameplay loop, pretty pictures, banger music, and coop is cross platform and pretty great! Seriously consider buying at any price, support these devs! They're putting something amazing into the indie scene and I'm very happy to be a customer of theirs :)

Thank you for making this :)

I'm seemingly halfway through, I am absolutely in love with this game. The humour is perfect for me, it's topical for modern day twenty somethings. The music is stellar, I love what they've done putting so many twists on the corpo tunes, and the ART, oh my god, the ART! Art is often the last thing I'm focused on in games, when you put the 3 core facets in front of me (gameplay, art, sound). The first thing about this game that drew me in was the reclamation of the corpo artstyle, and how much amazing personality they give that style. The character designs are super endearing, monsters are varied and clever, and animations are perfect for each personality.

It's hard for me to fully explain, but the way this game feels is so comfortable. There are a few games in history where I just feel comfortable in their hub worlds, namely Super Mario Sunshine, A Hat in Time, Splatoon 1, and now, Going Under joins that small group of games where I just feel at home. Everything about it, from the stage design of the hub world, to the music, the decorations, the level of detail inside and outside, and the population of these characters... I'm totally enchanted in a way I can't describe.

I'm not quite done and I anticipate many more great hours with this game, and I want to give a full proper review later. As it stands, though, this is already a game I wish I grabbed on launch, at full price, had I known aggrocrab was so talented. This game makes me want to pick up game development. I'm a composer, but this makes me want to learn how to 3d model, how to animate, how to code. Everything about this game makes me wanna learn how to make something this cool.

Thanks aggrocrab, hope to meet you guys at PAX one day :)

This has to be the go-to party game for steam remote play nights with my friends.

The art is cute and really nicely polished, a lot of attention to detail in the character models too! Each character has a different death animation, something that sounds really minute, but actually lends itself to making the game's production value feel a lot higher due to not a single character model feeling cloned from another. Although characters have no mechanical differences, it totally sells personality of these little food dudes and that matters a lot for art's sake. (I bought the character DLC right away to support the devs, and to give a few of my friends new favorites to get attached to. A fantastic value at about 3.40 CAD, and a great opportunity to support Cranky Watermelon)

The gameplay is simple to understand but full of depth with powerup mixing, meaning that new players can get in on the action really fast, and people I play this with consistently have room to create a "meta" (which is rarely enforced due to randomized powerups, a fantastic decision to encourage a party atmosphere).

The music is fantastic, the main menu theme has been my ringtone for a few months now, and all the music in game is really, really great! As a composer for games myself I've been listening to the OST for this game to try to learn new skills for my own tunes.

15 hours in a party game that's local multiplayer only, during a pandemic where I cannot have people over to play this locally. This should tell you a lot about how much fun this game is, even over remote play or parsec, that my friend group (massive variety in game taste, but a lot of competitive moba and shooter players) actively ask to play this game every couple evenings.

I think things that could be improved are the stages with collapsible floors, and the stage set for each game. I think only one of these things would require an adjustment to rectify my issues with it. The crumbling floor stages end incredibly fast, and kinda kills the tension between players when there's only 2 left. I can see the justification for this speed by saying its a change of pace compared the arena boundaries closing in really slowly, creating a different kind of tension, but maybe it's just not to my tastes. I think if these stages were not to be tweaked, I would really appreciate a way to see every possible stage in the game and toggle some off. Stick fight: the game allows you to do this, and I use the feature very sparingly, but it's a big help to avoid the stages where everyone goes "Ugh, this one again?". Doesn't mean the stage is bad, just means it isn't to our group's taste.

This game's been made with love and care, you can really feel that when you play it. Cranky Watermelon did a great job with this game, and I can totally vouch for it at full purchase price. Please, do your friend group a favour and add this to your library. Can't wait for the next stuff from this studio, I have very high hopes. :)

The greatest "I'm watching a show or talking to people but still need something to satisfy my hee hoo monkey brain" game of all time, bar none.

Temporary short review until I decide to elaborate:

Possibly my favorite story in game history, super fun combat and tons of upgrades, high quality visuals, tons of character, innumerable distractions from the main serious campaign in the form of minigames. Please play this game.