Critter Crunch Review

Let me preface this review with a warning: I am not very good at video games. I love playing them, but I laugh whenever I see a game has less than 10 hours of gameplay, as I’ve never played through a good full game in less than 15 hours (Uncharted holds that record). That said, in about a week I still haven’t beaten Critter Crunch, so play through times on the main portion of the game are rather fluid in my opinion, and really it all depends on how much fun you had playing through.

Playing through Critter Crunch is really, really fun. If you’ve heard of Critter Crunch, you’ll most likely associate it with one thing: adorable. It’s so hard, in fact, to ignore the adorable qualities of Critter Crunch that some might ignore an otherwise fantastic puzzler that’s just done right. In the world of Critter Crunch, much like our own, there is an island, Krunchatoa, and on this island Biggs is king.

Critters on Krunchatoa mysteriously have crystals for innards, and Biggs has just the digestive system to process these so he can vomit up rainbows into his eager children’s mouths. How does an adorable creature such as Biggs get to these delectable crystals within the critters? By exploding them of course! Critter Crunch thus introduces it’s main gameplay mechanic: food chains. At any given point there will be, usually, at least three different types of critters (some special levels only have two).

The three main critters are flies (small), medium sized bugs, and big bugs. Logical readers will have deduced that you can feed flies to medium sized bugs, but not big bugs, and medium sized bugs to big bugs. Any two smaller bugs fed to a larger bug will cause the bigger bug to explode, but you can also feed a fly to a medium bug, then feed that to a big bug to explode the big bug. You can get a food chain when you feed a fly to a medium bug that is already beneath a big bug, which nets you a bonus coin to increase your score multiplier.

These critters aren’t just sitting up there waiting to be blown up though. They hang on vines above you, shimmying down every once in a while to reveal the next line of critters. In some levels they don’t do this, but that’ll be explained later. Within this is so much variety due to the sheer number of extras attached to the bugs. Sometimes a bug will be poisoned, which will slowly spread the disease outward. A diseased bug drops a jewel and some poison, which makes you lose points, and holding the diseased bug in your mouth also loses you points.

There are also various other types of critters, like the bomb, which when fed twice will blow up a square around it. You’ll also encounter the rainbow critter, blocker, and a few others, but I’ll let you play the game to discover their uses. Add into all of this various items that will drop from certain combos of bugs, like the pepper, spray can, or watermelon (which lets you shoot seeds at any critter to kill them).

As if all this were not enough there are also veggie critters, who refuse to eat any type of critter, but can be fed to non-veggie critters. In the main mode the usual goal is to collect crystals to fill up your hunger bar on the left. If you get a combo your son might pop by, just stroll to him and vomit some rainbows into his mouth. Be warned though, this makes the critters come down their vines faster since they like the vomit produced from their fallen brethren crystal innards as well. Sometimes you will be faced with just two types of critters, or maybe a smaller board. Other times you will have egg creatures on the board, with the goal being to save them, and not collect crystals.

The three other main modes are puzzle, challenge and survival. Puzzle sets you up with a set board of critters and a set number of moves. Find the combo of moves that destroys all the critters on screen and you win. Challenge mode is a bit more intense as it sets specific goals for the map (for example getting at least eight food chains in 60 seconds). Survival mode is simply playing as many levels as you can without dying. Finally, there is a multi-player component. Multiplayer is fantastic, adding in attack items in versus mode, and cooperative mode is a blast as well. There’s not much else to say here as it’s essentially the same thing as the game, but against another person, which always adds exponential fun in a puzzle game, especially versus mode.

Next up are the visuals. They are, in a word, flawless. Everything is hand drawn, from the critters, to the dynamic backgrounds, to the Biggs himself (yes it’s a he). I personally love when a nice 1080p HD game is beautifully hand drawn on my big screen TV. It just sits nice in my heart, especially when so much care and detail is evident in the game. You need only look at a few screens to get an idea of how pretty this game is (watch the video above).

The music is a pleasure to listen to as well, and usually doesn’t get in the way. You will sometimes find yourself humming the menu screen song as you select the next level in adventure mode. All of the sound effects are appropriately cute and disgusting as is needed (though thankfully the vomiting sound is just adorable).

The best part about this game just might be its price. At $6.99 it’s definitely one of the cheaper PSN games out there. Considering you get well over 150 combined puzzle and challenge levels, a full fledged adventure mode that is of appropriate length and a highly enjoyable and replayable multiplayer mode, this is more than just a bargain. I say to you PS3 owners, buy this game! For those of you on the fence, there is a demo of the game available on PSN so that you can see first hand how awesome this game is.