Crunchdown Review

Crunchdown is a flash animation action/fighter game created by Newgrounds.com user Tom Brien (I-smel). This brawler game was submitted to Newgrounds.com on October 10, 2008 and won a Daily 4th Place award on October 11, 2008.

Game Background

You are this short white blobby person thing and are hanging out with your friend, who is all yellow. He wakes you up and tells you that there's a riot going on outside. Suddenly, your friend finds that his door is broken from the riot. He gets really pissed off, and you decide to go find out what the riot is about. The game begins there...

Controls

Press arrow keys to run around
Press A to punch and do combos
Press S to eat things
Press Enter to pause game

Gameplay

The first thing you can do is pick the number of lives you would wish to have. You can have anywhere between 1 and 20 lives. Then the game begins. Your goal is to fight all the bad guys and figure out what's going on with the riots.

You can eat almost anything along the way. Eating things will allow you to gain the ability of that object. Press S to eat things. Once you have transformed, you can press S to use your new ability. The top left hand corner will display a timer that will let you know how much longer you can use the new ability before returning back to your old self.

Abilities range from fighting like your enemies (doing uppercuts, tackling, boxing) to becoming as bouncy as a basketball, to turning into a bicycle wheel, or spewing garbage, or shooting leaves.

Review

Crunchdown has a great game concept but fails in almost every other respect. The gameplay is slow and frustrating. Movements are awkward and can be nauseating. There are even some glitches that make the game unplayable, like disappearing completely from the game. With such an interesting game idea, it's really a shame that the gameplay had to blow.

My favorite part about the game, besides the idea, was the cutscenes. It was funny to watch the story unfold with the language used. It made the game semi-copeable. However, even with the funny cutscenes, the gameplay was far too horrible to continue playing.

Crunchdown scores a 2/10. It gets two points for great game idea, but because of its lack of playability and entertainment, Crunchdown fails miserably. Fixing gameplay issues and making the game run smoother would make this game most excellent.