Crystal Catacombs Reviews

I think this is the first negative review I've made. TL;DR you play as some chameleon-eyed ass mother fucker who can't jump right and is really bad at finding cool things. It's been said by basically everyone; the map design and controls combine to make an experience that is very difficult to enjoy. But none of the reviews I read really went into detail about why the controls fail. The original Castlevania was even more static than this, but it was fine because the enemies were also very rigid in their movement and attack patterns. In this game, you're expected to be making wall jumps and avoid flying enemies and projectiles that can move at any angle while still being stuck with very stiff movement. In short, the enemy and level design are in direct conflict with the fundamentals of how the game plays. Half the time you'll engage with an enemy, but have nowhere to jump because the hallways are all too short, and no way to back off quickly enough to avoid whatever it's probably shooting at you, and with the starting sword, you have be just about inside of an enemy to hit it. I found a shield once, but it had a durability bar that didn't recharge, and you couldn't move while using it, rendering it just about useless. The shield was also the only thing I found during my playtime besides health potions, so I can't even speak for any cool powerups to be found. The problem with the platforming is that your jump momentum remains constant, even if you let go of whatever directional button you had pressed. I'm a novice when it comes to programming, but this should be an extremely fundamental problem that would take very little change to fix, but the devs have ignored it regardless. Wall jumps are wonky, and with how often you have to do them, it gets old quick. With the movement and combat as it is, trying to navigate the dungeons, I feel I'm fighting the controls more than the enemies. It simply lacks the mechanical fluidity we expect of a modern metroidvania game. The idea is nice, and with some polish, it could be a great game, but it's received no love from the devs. The game's main saving grace is that the pixel art environments look pretty good. Get it if it's like 75% off and you're willing to subject yourself to the endless repetition of "how was I supposed to avoid that" deaths, or if they ever revamp the controls.

A pixel-art action roguelite that plays like a metroidvania although it is very flawed. the most glaring flaw is it is repetitive and withholds any cool power ups to make it actually interesting. I played this game for about twenty minutes and did not get a single item drop. Are there items? I assume so. There is an inventory. There is a weapon quick select bar on the top of the screen. But nope. Same crap starting sword with its same crap range for the entire twenty minutes I played it. This is like if one of the older castlevania games refused to put any throwing daggers or axes in any of the candles for the first three levels. Of course the game is going to utterly fail to maintain my interest if it doesn't let me do anything interesting. Twenty minutes is a long time for an action game. I don't think it is too much to ask to do something but a single basic sword sweep during that time and haven't seen anything like that outside of coffee break flash clicker games from the year 2000. I will give it one thing - the enemies have some really neat designs.

A solid, hard game, with outstanding music. Pixel graphics seem to make a lot of people really mad for some reason, so watch out for that I guess.

In Crystal Catacombs you play an adventurer that travels to the mentioned crystal catacombs. There you have to fight through the different parts of the dungeon in a metroidvania-like fashion. The dungeons are procedurally generated, so every time you enter (or die) the dungeon will have another layout. The difficulty is kind of high.

I was very glad to see this game got greenlight! Crystal Catacombs can be quite difficult but, unlike many rogue-likes, is seldom unfair. The controls might take a little bit of getting used to (jumping is a bit floaty) but once you get over that minor hump the game is a blast. I really like how the save game functionality works. Similar to Rogue Legacy, whenever you defeat a final boss (i.e. complete one of the 5 worlds), that world is marked as completed even if you later die. However, progress within a world is not saved so you do have to complete each world in one go. I think this strikes a great balance between real challene and a sense of progression. If not for this feature, I likely would have given up due to the difficulty of the game. Being able to save completed worlds really gives a nice sense of relief when you have a good run. I would definitely recommend Crystal Catacombs!

This game had promise, but the way jump works ruins the entire experience. You have zero control over your character in mid-air. Despite many people complaining about this, the dev remained stubborn and decided to keep it that way. If that were changed, it might be a fun game, but that won't ever happen. Just play Vagante or Catacomb Kids instead.

What an odd game. Beautiful, but buggy. Clever, but a bit confused. The game is a difficult platformer with inventory and limited character development, and procedurally generated dungeons. It has many small bugs (on Linux, anyway) but only very occasionally did they interrupt the game. Crystal Catacombs does a great job of setting a particular, claustrophobic mood. Lovecraftian monsters, an intentionally tight field of vision (made more-so by darkness), and random maps populated by both easy and brutally difficult enemies all add to this vague sense of panic. The music, which I adore, is also unusual (is it modal? Is that right?) and adds to the experience. The beautiful pixel art is the main attraction, but the graphics are not nearly as retro as the gameplay. That's neither an insult nor a compliment. While it's a platformer, the level design and advancement are a lot more true to the spirit of Rogue than glut of roguelike and roguelite cousins. Death is common, especially at first, and sometimes can seem unfair or arbitrary. Again, not really a insult or a compliment, but if you're approaching this with a strictly modern sensibility, I have a feeling you're going to be frustrated. And yes, the controls are difficult. Perhaps slighty more difficult than other similar retro games, but I didn't find them dramatically so, and I don't really think this is necessarily a bad thing. The game is very obviously designed to be difficult. There are a handful of game-mechanic innovations I haven't seen anywhere else, also. As an example, the use of exploding... flower-petals? I don't know that they are supposed to be, but they slowly drift down the screen on later levels, and do a fair amount of damage when hit. Usually easy to avoid, they sometimes make otherwise simple encounters more difficult, and provide an added source of urgency. This is either genius or criminally unpleasant, depending on your expectations. I go with the former, but it's a matter of taste. Everything about this game feels like it was a labor of love. It has flaws, and many debatable aspects, but it's definitely a work of art.

It has nice visuals, everything else is awful. This game was terrible right off the bat. The character control is way too slow, your sword takes an entire second to swing, you can't move during it and there are very few enemies that die in one hit. You don't start with any form of dodging and your character moves at the pace of molasses, so pretty much any enemy can hit you if you attack them which is all the time because you need the xp. The jump is slow and kind of hard to control plus the wall jumping is not good, it takes a split second for the game to realize you made contact with the wall before you can jump. Also I experienced game breaking glitches only 2 minutes into my play through: one where my character hovered to the right and phasing through all the walls without me being able to do anything and one only a few minutes later where the game constantly thought I was in quicksand after leaving some quicksand. 2/10.

I was really starting to love the game but the Snow/Ice level changed all that. First, my computer is a potato, I'll admit that, but the snow effect coupled with all the enemies made my framerate drop like crazy, I'm talking between 10 and 2 fps. My computer is a potato because I enjoy retro-style games that require little power, and I buy retro-style-games because they can run on my potato... This is very dissapointing. I managed to kill the problematic enemies and continue my game but then I found a game breaking glitch. When using a teleporter, if the character isn't locked in the middle of it, the player loses all control (not even able to open the menu) and waiting for the destroyer doesn't even fix it as they just hover on top of the character. My guess is that the character gets locked in the teleporter by removing all control from the player for an instant. There is ice physics on the teleporter, meanning you activate the teleporter, lose all control, the character slides off the teleporter, game soft locks. I wish the dev would make a quick patch (or someone would make a fan pach) because this game had a lot of potential.

At 10 minutes, I was a little confused. At 30 minutes, things started falling in to place. After an hour, I was addicted. Great retro game - definitely invokes some nostalgia. Extremely fun to play; very unforgiving. Some of the actions like wall jumping are a little tricky to master with a controller, but it doesn't hurt the gameplay.