Saturday, August 27, 2011

Hyper Crush: The 8-Bit Adventure - 0.99 (Voxel Software, LLC)

Hyper Crush: The 8-Bit Adventure is the official platformer game of the musical group, Hyper Crush, made by Voxel Software. In it, you’ll play as all 3 band members, Holly, Preston and Donny, as you try to recover your special items and make it to The Moxy Theatre before your rival group, Slow Expand makes it there before you, stealing your time slot.

There are only 8 levels in Hyper Crush, and you’ll be forced to re-play each of the levels many, many times in order to get enough coins to buy Preston’s gun, which lets you break bricks. You MUST get this item in order to beat the game, because in level 5, you’ll start the level with a huge brick wall blocking your way. Once you get the brick breaking weapon, the game does become even more about collecting coins, and you’ll need to buy a pair of shoes in the shop as well that will let you make a huge jump in level 6. This amount of grinding can get pretty boring, and really take away from the gameplay experience.
The controls in Hyper Crush are pretty good, tight and responsive, but jumping feels a bit floaty. These floaty physics don’t really work well in conjunction with the tight controls, but it’s not enough to make you quit playing. Graphics-wise, the game is nice, and the environments look a lot like the original Super Mario Brothers, while the backgrounds kind of stand out against the platforms and bricks with their clear and polished looking cityscapes, but the mesh of the two goes together quite well, while the level select screen is set up exactly like World 1 of Super Mario Brothers 3. This tribute to Super Mario does bring back a lot of childhood memories, until you realize that you only have 8 levels and will be playing each of them at least 5 times in order to get enough coins to buy the items you need to complete the game.
All-n-all, Hyper Crush is a solid platformer that was executed poorly. The inclusion of a shop and the drive to collect coins along with the retro graphics don’t really make up for the lack of content and forced grinding. But then again, it’s really made as a game for the fans of Hyper Crush, so what do you expect? For $0.99 there’s plenty of great platformers in the AppStore that will give you more than 10 times the content.





Hyper Crush: The 8-Bit Adventure gets a score of 3/10.




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