I'm not a person who is very fond of the sea. Grant Kirkhope kind of ruined that for me (he knows what he did). However, this game immediately got my attention due to the fact that it has crabs fighting one another in one on one death matches at various locales.
...no, really. How is that not awesome.
Also, the title card for it on Steam depicts a crab wielding a sawed-off shotgun, and I don't think I need to reiterate my rule of Shotguns Are Awesome to you all as I have in so many of my previous reviews. The game has a campaign mode, which is where I immediately started due to me wanting to avoid multiplayer at every opportunity and was immediately dropped in a wrestling ring and taken through a tutorial in the way the game works.
The controls remind me of QWOP, though considerably more stable. You stride forward and go claw to claw with the other crabs, blocking as necessary with the intention of knocking your opponent onto their back and leaving them there for three seconds, meaning you win the round (or, in some cases, that individual fight). The controls aren't that bad at all, though I'm still rather confused by the insistence it has upon booting up that we use a controller instead of the mouse and keyboard. The controls seem much more organic to PC than they do to console and I don't know about you, but I'm one of those people that can play a game either on PC or console, not both.
My neurons only fire that quickly for three things and FightCrab is neither the contents of my fridge nor hiding in Tina's bra.
Seriously, though, this is something that always confuses me. It's rather like what Erica was doing two weeks ago - wanting me to use a completely different control scheme when the one I'm using works just fine. Maybe that's just to allow us to choice or comfort, but if I'm playing on PC I tend to enjoy staying with the control scheme that I know a PC has versus immediately digging out a controller for my PS4 of the Xbone.
Or to put it another way: I don't jump to drive a stick shift when I can drive an automatic just fine.
What starts off as merely some sort of bizarre QWOP-esque fighting game themed around crabs quickly becomes this anime-esque thing with music and over the top sound effects to match, giving it a very unique feel and visual design. The tone this created was best demonstrated early on in the single player missions where you learn and are familiarized with the controls and battle other crabs for supremacy in locales such as an underwater wrestling ring, a hidden cove, and what looks to be downtown Tokyo.
It was in that third location that I was fighting crabs until a lobster showed up wielding a knife and a gun.
...wait, what?!
This was later followed by a blue lobster wielding what appeared to be a rocket engine to either claw.
Yeah, it's that kind of game - that is, stupidly awesome (see also the previous mention of a sawed-off shotgun). This becomes more so with the RPG elements. You receive money from fights that you can use to buy weapons, change your skin from a crab to a different kind of crab to a lobster (et al.), and upgrade your base stats such as the standard Strength, Dexterity, etc. You will actually need to upgrade at points in order to keep up. There is a difficulty curve to be found here, even if it gets on the level of peanut butter and arsenic levels of crazy.
Largely because, y'know...rocket engine lobster claws.
That all said, while there is some strategy involved, most of the fights are going to be you flailing against your opponent and hitting them with repeated strikes with your claws while timing blocks with yours. Both you and your opponent have a percentage in a very Smash Brothers-esque manner with largely the same task - namely making how easily your clock can be cleaned. The higher the number, the easier it is to knock your opponent on their back and prepare the three count.
You can apparently rise from a knock down by punching, but it seems that the AI missed that memo as they don't ever seem to pull it off, not that this is a complaint. What is a bit of a complaint is when the combat feels like a battle of attrition more than it does a test of skill. Some of the fights drag on a bit too long for their own good - one fight in particular that I can recall had my opponents' percentage up to 167% before I saw any signs that his defense was faultering.
Of course, that was an end boss, so that might have been intentional.
On the whole, FightCrab is a game I can heartily recommend. I keep traveling back to it and there's a clear reason why. It's appealing in that same sort of beat 'em up way. If you're so inclined, it's only $20 on Steam as of this writing. Get it, try it out. If I haven't sold you on this by this point, then what the hell is wrong with you?
FightCrab was made by Nussoft and Calappa Games for Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, and Microsoft Windows.
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