For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of Crystal Breaker, from Terarin Games, but it's also coming out on Steam.
Regulars to the site will know that i'm not good at #shmup style games, but i am keen to try them to see if i can find one for me. What made Crystal Breaker interesting was how zoomed in it looked and how focused on close range attacking it was.
I don't know how common this is in the genre, of Shoot 'em ups, but for me i haven't played one quite like Crystal Breaker. the Demo starts with one of two cool pixel art start screens and it clearly says that it's a demo. it's a bit of a shame there's no link here, or elsewhere, to the game's eShop page. there's also no music and i wonder if that'll be true when it comes out. the main menu also has no music, but if you go into options there are sound options. when you pick one, it plays so you can hear when you raise or lower volumes. i recommend keeping voice under 50%, you'll be hearing it a lot but it sounds like an emotionless Ai.
But other than the annoying Ai voice, the music in the game is good. But it's weirdly unbalanced. each of the two stages i played have their own music and i enjoyed them. but in Crystal Breaker you're continuously powering up your weapons and when you reach full power you get the same song continuously playing. so even tho the stage songs are nice, i didn't really get to hear them often.
Crystal Breaker doesn't have a tutorial, it has a digital instruction manual that you can access via the main menu. unfortunately, this manual didn't have any moving pictures but there are pictures and i found the English clear enough to understand what's happening. i highly recommend checking this out first before trying to play the game if you're unfamiliar with this type of game.
Crystal Breaker doesn't complicate the gameplay with various mechanics. whilst this may make the game seem simple, for me i quite liked this approach and found Crystal Breaker somewhat good for newcomers. hitting/crashing into enemies doesn't damage you but their bullets will. This is fantastic and what's more Crystal Breaker isn't a Bullet Hell shmup, so it's not too difficult to dodge enemy attacks. our ship even has a booster option that can help us avoid incoming fire.
The goal of Crystal Breaker seems to be to get the highest score. to help the player achieve this there are plenty of power ups, plenty of things to shoot to help prolong and/or increase a combo, and there are crystals to pick up that some ships and things drop when hit. There are also various stage bonuses to find, targets a certain color to hit, and hidden targets that offer big points. simply put, Crystal Breaker encourages players to destroy as much as possible and gives players high scores for doing so. But there doesn't seem to be online leaderboards to compare scores with friends. in this demo it all seems local, or there's no obvious easy way to check what scores your friends got.
For me, what i found to be lacking in Crystal Breaker was a sense of story. i wanted more from my time with this DEMO, i wanted to be grabbed by a story but there isn't one here and i don't think there's one in the final game either. i don't know who the characters are, i don't know why we're doing this, and i don't know why there are crystals. I wanted some answers to this and didn't get any. So for me, i won't be getting Crystal Breaker, but that doesn't mean it's a bad game, nor does it mean this is a bad demo. it's a simple arcade Shmup that's designed to be a score chase and i guess i'm looking for more than that on a console. if Crystal Breaker came out on a pocketable portable like PSP, then i might be more interested in the pick up and quick play style of this game.
