Crumble Review

 

High Flying Platforming-A Crumble Review

Forays into the linear 3D platformer genre have been few and far between as of late, so you can imagine my surprise stumbling upon Crumble, a physics based linear level progression platformer from small indie studio Brute Force Games. 

Fast Rolling Fun

Crumble is a game that is wholly willing to embrace its physics system and design huge levels around gaining speed and flinging around corners. By using your tongue you can latch onto any surface and climb up or use momentum to swing around the level. It is this combination of rolling, jumping, and swinging that creates such a generally delightful experience. 

What makes me truly love crumble may be the precedent it presents to other developers-to be confident in your main body of mechanics and not overcomplicate things. Avid readers of this blog have seen me on an on explain my love for games that keep the mechanics simple and use the environment to present new challenges-of which crumble is no stranger. 

Some levels in this game will present you with huge vertical climbs, utilizing all types of maneuvering based on your grapple-like tongue, whereas others will focus on your ground movement, launching you into open fields at Mach speeds. Whatever the challenge may be, nothing ever mounts to frustration over sudden new mechanics or obstacles being introduced.

Swinging Through the Past

Crumble at its core feels somewhat like a mechanical love letter to older 3D platformers like Super Monkey Ball and, to a lesser extent, sonic adventure. What Brute Force Games has done here is combine what made iconic levels in those older titles great and mashed them into one complete package. The momentum of Sonic and the calculated level design of Super Monkey Ball minus all the nagging issues of game design's past coalesce into what was genuinely 4 perfect hours of gameplay. 

Another aspect of games past that I saw in Crumble was the encouragement to push yourself to beat the game's levels as fast as possible. Beating a level fast enough will award you a star on that level, and with enough stars you unlock additional bonus stages to traverse through. Even after finishing the main campaign, I felt encouragement to go back through the game and try to get all those stars. 

Verdict

The game design excellence of Crumble is acutely amazing, and it sucks to see how incredibly underrated this gem has been. If you have the means to give it a shot, I seriously cannot reccomend a game more for platformer fans. 

10/10-Platforming Indie Excellence


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