Crashlands Review

When Crashlands crash landed onto my hard drive, I could have sworn that I just downloaded a Newgrounds game. The Flash-esque visuals, basic sounds, and off the walls comedy all pointed to the venerable website's touch, but instead of the iconic image of a pilot in a tank, I was greeted with a singing signature of three dudes who call themselves Butterscotch Shenanigans. At once inscrutable and derivative, Crashlands is as nonsensical as the name of its developers.

At first, the old school graphics and bouncy animations were charming. “Oh joy of joys!” I cried. “A plucky indie title with quaint graphics and sound. How retro!” Well, I didn’t actually say that, but the simple humbleness of Crashlands’ presentation had me hoping for a plucky underdog title with some hidden gems under its deceptively simple isometric presentation. As minutes turned into hours, I was presented with similar looking flora and fauna and a completely flat world whose utter lack of geometry was almost repulsive. I quietly thanked fate for giving the game such an unobtrusive set of sounds and a forgettable soundtrack, for it was a small blessing to have only one of his major senses offended at any given time. It was at that moment that I came to fully understand the depths of Crashlands’ utter mediocrity.

As purple power armored space truck driver, Flux, I was thrust into a totaled spaceship, the plot of a casually confident evil alien named Hewgodokoo, and a mish mash of RPG, crafting, and open world gameplay. I was quickly informed that I needed to send a space faring SOS to get rescued and deliver my package. With my trusty robotic companion, Juicebox, at my side, I began an epic quest for survival. Of course in this case, an epic quest for survival is actually just whacking things until they explode into useful crafting components. These raw materials can be converted into weapons, armor, and tools to chop/mine higher quality materials to convert into more of the same. Butterscotch Shenanigans attempts to sweeten the deal with random magical effects on each crafted object a la Diablo, but that only serves to highlight the fact that items tend to be identical in application. While I did get my hands on a sweet boomerang wrench that stunned whatever unfortunate wildlife I happened to be poaching at the moment, even that novelty wore off rather quickly as I returned to the mad clicking frenzy of killing, gathering, and crafting. From within the vortex of canned quests that would be more suited to a particularly boring MMORPG, I did, however, spy Crashlands' single redeeming, if incredibly niche, feature.

Amidst a heaping pile of unused crafting materials and nagging reminders to complete quests I was completely uninterested in, I glimpsed the dull glimmer of humor. From Flux's seemingly perpetual sugar high attitude to the planet's oddly captivating inhabitants, the text-only dialogue of Crashlands is the highlight of the game, even if it is inconsistent. Jokes miss the mark as much as they hit it, but unpredictable funnies are Crashlands' signature. Never mind that it is illegible and somehow has emoticons flowing out of the cursive script.

Whether it is being funny, boring, or completely alien, Crashlands is a marriage of go-for-broke character and utter mediocrity. Fans of wacky humor, repetitive gameplay, and generic crafting will emerge from the craters of their ships with Cheshire cat grins on their faces, but everyone else will just call a mechanic and wait this one out.