xbox live indie game reviews

There's a lot to like about Crystal Crush, but ultimately it wasn't enough there to cover up the deficiencies in the core mechanic. The basic gameplay takes place on a hex grid. Three chutes (left, right, and bottom) are placed around the grid to dispense crystals. Depending on the game mode, these crystals deploy automatically or wait for you to press the A button. The destination tile on the grid will vibrate to let you know where your crystal will land when fired, but you can continue to rotate the board while the tiles fall into place. Each crystal fired costs energy, and if you run out of energy the game ends (this only happened to me once in about 30 games). Crystals with stars give more energy than normal crystals.

You can repulse crystals by making them bounce off a solid wall with no empty tiles for it to land. If you bounce a colored crystal off of another crystal of the same type, both crystals will vanish (this can be used strategically in some game modes). Crystal with skulls on them (or in modes where precision is required, placing a crystal in the wrong place) cause a skull to appear on screen and all three chutes to start firing rapidly for a brief amount of time. This is the most likely cause of energy depletion (and game over), but it's fairly easy to avoid (just repulse the skulls off of a solid wall).

There are four game modes, each with 12 levels. The similar "Color Match" and "Repulse" modes have board with tiles what will only accept a single color. These are interesting at first, but eventually turn into a waiting game--if you only need green crystals, you may have to sit through a half-dozen blue and red crystals just to get a chance to place a green crystal in the proper place. Because the aiming mechanic isn't that simple, you're just as likely to repulse that green crystal with another green crystal, which means you now need even more of them.

"Match-3" is the simplest of the game types. The board is prepopulated with various crystals and play goes until you clear them all. You could sit there and rack up points forever or clear them as quickly as possible... I couldn't really tell a reason to prefer one strategy over the other. The most interesting game type is the "Join" type, which involves building a chain of blinking crystals from one side of the board to the other. Like Match-3, this one starts with some "junk" in the way. Once you get that stuff cleared out, the game quickly reverts back to a waiting game.

The menus and graphics for Crystal Crush are great. The music and sound effects are perfect. Some of the copy is a little poorly translated (or written, whichever is the case), but overall the game feels very well done. The main problem I have with the game is that it's just not that fun. Pressing either of the triggers rotates the board once in the given direction, and holding them down lets you rotate freely. I very rarly want to rotate just once, and the free rotation takes just a little too long to get started and spins just a little too fast. The end result is that I just have to press the triggers repeatedly to align the board how I like, and it feels a little too mechanical. Because rotating is cumbersome, two or three crystals often back up and I have to just accept that some will land where I don't want them to. If the only activity in the game is rotating the game board, more effort could've gone into polishing that mechanic.

The crystals slide down the chutes for a little ways, but they're "under glass" and it can be very hard to tell which color is which until it's too late to do anything about it. This is doubly true for crystals with stars or skulls on them, as there is even less colored surface to decipher. The addition of "energy" seems tacked on and doesn't really gel with the rest of the game. The deliberate pace can be a little frustrating, especially as there's no sense of acceleration (the "skull" mode is just chaos, you can't go from 0-60 like that or it's just nonsense). Because the game has no difficulty ramp, it gets boring quickly. I ultimately felt like this was 4 side modes. Because there's no single "play me!" mode (a la Tetris or similar puzzle games), there was no motivation for playing over and over again to beat a high score or make it to a higher level.

If anything, the game is relaxing. If you can get past the flaws in the rotation mechanics and you enjoy the gameplay, there's enough there to keep you occupied for awhile. There's just a little too much waiting for my taste, though, so I ultimately decided it wasn't worth the 400 point pricetag.