Crystarise Reviews

I played this game on stream, if you want to watch my initial impressions, the archive will be linked at the bottom of the review. Overall, this game has cute graphics and a really interesting concept that is unfortunately executed poorly. You will expand your island town and recover crystals that are found throughout the world below. Exploring the continent below entails common survival elements (but let me be clear: this is not a survival game) of exploring for resources to collect and gather to expand you island town. The interesting part is that the island town sort of acts like your skill tree/you RPG progression. Which opens up interesting opportunities for not just build craft, but optimizing how you place your buildings to enhance your theory crafted build. The problem comes in with the design of the continent: Firstly, the game relies heavily on what I call "BS" design. Nearly every single death I had in this game was at no fault of my own unless you consider "I had no idea nor any indication that would happen". Such as very normal looking wooded boxes exploding randomly, getting spawned in lava, or mushrooms suddenly becoming sentient and poisoning so severely that I die long after the threat was defeated. The game winds up heavily teaching me to just use my pea-shooter because using my sword results in immediate death. Secondly, the world itself becomes rather dull rather quickly. As an overworld, it works well enough to help move you from point A to B, but there isn't much to do besides explore dungeons, but dungeons don't much different from the overworld other than being dark and somewhat linear. There are no stage hazards and combat becomes very repetitious very quickly. For once, I feel like this game would benefit from some of the randomness found in rogue-like design, but unfortunately it lacks those surprises and thus stagnates rather quickly. So, as I said; it's cute charming art, with a cool concept, but unfortunately executed poorly. If you would like to see my experience with it, you can find the archive to my stream below: https://youtube.com/live/uMOaeeO0xUw?feature=share