A chicken, a goat, and a sociopathic alligator walk into a bar. The bartender asks, "Why the long face?"
http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/32119/crazy-hunter-nintendo-ds
I'm not going to start this review with a pithy one-liner, something like, "This chicken isn't dropping golden eggs." I'm certainly not going to employ game-themed hyperbole, so don't expect me to say, "I would rather walk into a gator's mouth than play this anymore." Instead, I'm just going to distill the game down to a single phrase: there is absolutely zero reason for anyone who has ever or will ever live to play Crazy Hunter.
As near as I can deduce, Crazy Hunter is about an alligator that is concussed when a cloud-resident chicken drops one of its golden eggs on his head. Lucky for him, his river is populated with a highly improbable number of goats standing on towers built out of candy, and it turns out Dundee (I guess he's actually a crocodile) just happens to have a boat.
I bet you can put the rest together from there.
Who am I kidding? Of course you can't.
We all know the story of the chicken that laid the golden egg; obviously its offspring are the path to great wealth. In a move of self-interest that would make Ayn Rand blush, Dundee concocts a scheme to relieve the hen of her eggs. First, he rams the goats off their towers. Then he uses the goats as building material for a new tower with which he can reach the golden eggs and their mother, presumably with ill-intent all around. From there, it's all about the sweet life. Never mind the fact the goats already HAD towers or that candy is clearly a suitable tower building material—the goats must stack. This premise is bonkers. It's as if they tried to capture what makes Angry Birds charming without actually understanding what the word means.
They also failed to capture what makes games fun, because across the game's three gameplay modes there is not one iota of it. When driving the boat upstream the task is to simply knock off the goats and reach the end of the course before your fuel runs out. Controlling the boat isn't especially complex; half the face buttons accelerate the boat and the other half make it jump. The problem is in controlling the boat's angle—turning it to hit the towers seems to require undue effort. The boat switches between sharp turns that feel as if it were on ice, to slow turns that will forever prevent me from using the trite comparison of a video game character's turning speed to a boat in all future reviews.
Once you reach the top of the river, Dundee has to harvest his fallen goats via a two button-press crane game. After a few stages, you need to place the goats he collects, Jenga-style, in tower form in to reach the eggs. If you fail any of the challenges, at any point, you are simply bumped back to the main menu. Crazy Hunter is even more boring than it sounds, and becomes mind numbing in a matter of seconds. It is as if someone took three mini-games from any random Mario Party, made them worse, and bundled them together as a "game."
Look into his dead eyes! He knows he is the ultimate building material.
The game's visual style smacks of a ShockWave Flash game circa 1999. The water effects look nice, but the gator and his wedge of cheesecake-like watercraft look awful, and the absolutely flat and stagnant goat sprites are horrifying. Even the hand-drawn assets look like something from a mid-'90s website. During the crane game, Dundee sits on the bottom right of the upper screen at the controls of a crane (the only indicator from the game as to what the hell you're supposed to be doing). You can tell he's hard at work because of his astounding two frames of jagged animation. Even the menus look horrible, with pre-rendered text distorted to the point of looking busted. The audio is seemingly out of the same time warp as the visuals. There are about three sickeningly upbeat songs that loop in a matter of seconds. Beyond the hum of the boat's engine, there are also two highly garbled goat sound effects, one sound from Dundee that seems as if he were being run through a washing machine, and an inexplicable monkey sound that chirps every single time you change a letter on the high score screen, which is totally not annoying in the slightest.
Crazy Hunter isn't a disaster of a game. It's not riddled with bugs or flaws that could earn it notoriety. It's worse. Crazy Hunter is a game incapable of generating sensations approximating even the faintest of joys. It is shallow, insipid, and utterly devoid of polish. But worst of all, it's boring.
Topic: Crazy Hunter Review (Read 1853 times)
