Crush
At this time, I have completely forgotten when I first got Crush. I remember being intrigued by the concept and picking up a copy a long time ago, but after playing it for awhile it sort of became reduced to something I only bothered with during travels when the batteries in my DS went out.
Crush is a puzzle-platformer with the unique feature that you can anytime “crush” the 3D world into two dimensions and traverse the landscape as if it were flat. A great idea that is fun to play around with for the first few levels, but it soon becomes rather tedious, and as hinted at in the introduction Crush contains a really large amount of levels that take a long time to complete. Sure, it introduces new gameplay elements along the way but all in all it’s just increasingly difficult challenges to try and discern a path to whatever place you need to go by looking at the level from different perspectives.
Having recently played Braid I might be a little spoiled with non-repetitive puzzlers, but playing crush I often felt like a lot of obstacles where there just to make the game longer, not more interesting. And while the game’s platforming isn’t bad by my standards, it’s not really on par with action-based platform games so when it throws time- or precision-based challenges at you it often becomes a question of luck rather than skill – annoying since the sometimes sparse checkpoints force you to replay a large part of the level that pose no challenge once you’ve figured it out. I might have thought the game to be less repetitive if the story and art direction where any better, as it is now the artwork is interesting for awhile but more or less the same throughout the entire game, and while some might like the story I found it uninspiring and the characters uninteresting.
Some time into Crush I lost interest as there wasn’t anything that left me wanting more – no promise of new and interesting gameplay challenges or new things to see and no intriguing story to unravel. Since then I’ve only really played it on trains and airplanes when in the need to kill time, so perhaps it is unfair of me to say now that I didn’t care much for it – I liked it for a short time when I first started playing, after all. I have said that I prefer games that don’t overstay their welcome, but on the other hand – if I think a game is getting tedious, is it my fault for not simply putting down the game and enjoying what was, or should the game be blamed for not providing some sort of progress and conclusion without tedium? If you’re okay with growing tired of games before they’re over, Crush is for you. If you’re a completionist like me, it’s not.
Yeah, I have to agree with most of that – the core mechanic is brilliant, but the game’s overlong and as a result you get bored of it as the game progresses…
Still, having a brilliant core mechanic puts it above 95% games out there in my view 🙂