I have been playing more Another Crab’s Treasure (Aggro Crab) and talking about it in the RKG Discord. Here is part one in which I did a very brief overview of the game (plus some random ranting).
Spoiler, kinda? This is about accessibility, and one way Aggro Crab made it easier was they added a gun. Yes, a gun. It one-shot kills everything (and is a shell, which is weird. I don’t know what happens when it breaks. It’s very hardy. Maybe you have to ask for another), and I have started a new playtrhough with it–a gun run.
In roughly an hour, I have gotten to where I am in my main playthrough. Which has taken me four or five hours. Or more. Probably more. I will say a sizable chunk of that timme was me not knowing what to do next because I simply do not think in the same way as the game devs. That’s when I gave in and finally looked it up. It really annoyed me, and I made a promise to myself that if I keep playing the game, I’ll nrot wait so long to look shit up.
I want to say upfront that it’s a solid game. It’s bright and colorful, and the humor is on point. I appreciate what they were going for and I love that they went whole hog (crab?) for what they envisioned. I much rather have a game that sticks to its gun (heh) than one that is all over the map. This game knows what it wants to be, and it’s very confident in tone/approach.
That being said (and you knew this was coming), there is just something missing. I’ve been chatting about it with a few other people in the RKG Discord, and I’m relieved that I’m not the outlier when it comes to my frustrations with the combat. Here’s the thing. FromSoft is almost pristine when it comes to the combat. There are jokes about hitboxes (which are valid) and about the camera (also valid), but the response is tight.
Where many soulslikes fall flat is that they are too squishy on the responses. In a hard game with brutal combat, you have to have thatt shit on lock. A few that had spongy responses: The Lords of the Fallen (the new one); Steelrising; The Lords of the Fallen (the OG one). And I may be one of the few, but Lies of P had weird response times. It’s actually something that From does itself that is irritating–varies the response time so that you have to just memorize the attacks–which I cannot do. Skill Up mentioned this in his Stellar Blade review that one thing he liked about the game was that there were no delayed attacks by the enemies so the parrying was easier.